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THE YOUNG EMPEROR 

WILLIAM II OF GERMANY 




William II. 



THE YOUNG EMPEROR 

WILLIAM II OF GERMANY 



A STUDY IN CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT 
ON A THRONE 



BY 

HAROLD FREDERIC 
« > 

Author o/^^ In tfie Valley" " The Lawton Girl" ^'c, 6fc. 



WITH PORTRAITS 






NEW YORK ^ 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
1891 






:I]I^?.^.^ 



Copyright, 1891 

BY 

HAROLD FREDERIC 



1/ 



OM' 



TO MY EDITOR, AND EVEN MORE TO MY FRIEND, 

CHARLES R. MILLER 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. THE SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS . 1 3 

II. WILLIAM'S BOYHOOD 33 

III. UNDER CHANGED INFLUENCES AT BONN . . 49 

IV. THE TIDINGS OF FREDERIC'S DOOM . , 6$ 
V. THROUGH THE SHADOWS TO THE THRONE , 87 

VI. UNDER THE SWAY OF THE BISMARCKS . . I05 

VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF A BENEFICENT CHANGE . I23 

VIII. A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTAL ABSOLUTISM . . I4I 

IX. A YEAR OF HELPFUL LESSONS . • • . I53 

X. THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS • • • 169 

XI. A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK . • • . I93 

XII. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS . . , . . 219 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



WILLIAM II • • • • Frontispiece 

WILLIAM II AS A BOY ... .32 

FREDERIC III . . , , , ,70 

EMPRESS FREDERIC .... 78 

WILLIAM II IN HUNTING COSTUME . . . 224 



THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

(WILLIAM II OF GERMANY.) 

CHAPTER h 

THE SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS. 

In June of 1888, an army of workmen were toiling 
in the Champ de Mars upon the foundations of a 
noble World's Exhibition, planned to celebrate the 
centenary of the death by violence of the Divine 
Right of Kings. Four thousand miles westward, in 
the city of Chicago, some seven hundred delegates 
were assembled in National Convention, to select 
the twenty-third President of a great Republic, 
which also stood upon the threshold of its 
hundredth birthday. These were both suggestive 
facts, full of hopeful and inspiring thoughts to the 
serious mind. Considered together by themselves 
they seemed very eloquent proofs of the progress 
which Liberty, Enlightenment, the Rights of 



14 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

Man, and other admirable abstractions spelled 
with capital letters, had made during the century. 

But, unfortunately or otherwise, history will 
not take them by themselves. That same June 
of 1888 witnessed a spectacle of quite another 
sort in a third large city — a spectacle which gave 
the lie direct to everything that Paris and Chicago 
seemed to say. This sharp and clamorous note 
of contradiction came from Berlin, where a 
helmeted and crimson-cloaked young man, still 
in his thirtieth year, stood erect on a throne, 
surrounded by the bowing forms of twenty ruling 
sovereigns, and proclaimed, with the harsh, 
peremptory voice of a drill-sergeant, that he was 
a War Lord, a Mailed Hand of Providence, and a 
sovereign specially conceived, created, and invested 
with power by God, for the personal government 
of some fifty millions of people. 

It is much to be feared that, in the ears of the 
muse of history, the resounding shrillness of this 
voice drowned alike the noise of the hammers on 
the banks of the Seine and the cheering of the 
delegates at Chicago. 

Any man, standing on that throne in the White 
Saloon of the old Schloss at Berlin, would have 
to be a good deal considered by his fellow-creatures. 
Even if we put aside the tremendous international 
importance of the position of a German Emperor, 
in that gravely open question of peace or war, he 



SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS. 15 

must compel attention as the visible embodiment 
of a fact, the existence of which those who like it 
least must still recognize. This is the fact : that 
the HohenzoUerns, having done many notable 
things in other times, have in our day revivified 
and popularized the monarchical idea, not only in 
Germany, but to a considerable extent elsewhere 
throughout Europe. It is too much to say, per- 
haps, that they have made it beloved in any 
quarter which was hostile before. But they have 
brought it to the front under new conditions, and 
secured for it admiring notice as the mainspring 
of a most efficient, exact, vigorous, and competent 
system of government. They have made an 
Empire with it — a magnificent modern machine, 
in which army and civil service and subsidiary 
federal administrations all move together like the 
wheels of a watch. Under the impulse of this 
idea they have not only brought governmental 
order out of the old-time chaos of German divisions 
and dissensions, but they have given their subjects 
a public service, which, taken all in all, is more 
effective and well-ordered than its equivalent pro- 
duced by popular institutions in America, France, 
or England, and they have built up a fighting force 
for the protection of German frontiers which is at 
once the marvel and the terror of Europe. 

Thus they have, as has been said, rescued the 
ancient and time-worn function of kingship from 



i6 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

the contempt and odium into which it had fallen 
during the first half of the century, and rendered 
it once more respectable in the eyes of a utilitarian 
world. 

But it is not enough to be useful, diligent, and 
capable. If it were, the Orleans Princes might 
still be living in the Tuileries. A kingly race, to 
maintain or increase its strength, must appeal to 
the national imagination. The Hohenzollerns 
have been able to do this. The Prussian imagina- 
tion is largely made up of appetite, and their 
Kings, however fatuous and limited of vision they 
may have been in other matters, have never lost 
sight of this fact. If we include the Great 
Elector, there have been ten of these Kings, and 
of the ten eight have made Prussia bigger than 
they found her. Sometimes the gain has been 
clutched out of the smoke and flame of battle ; 
sometimes it has more closely resembled burglary, 
or bank embezzlement on a large scale ; once or 
twice it has come in the form of gifts from 
interested neighbours, in which category, perhaps, 
the cession of Heligoland may be placed — but 
gain of some sort there has always been, save only 
in the reign of Frederic William IV and the 
melancholy three months of Frederic III. 

That there should be a great affection for and 
pride in the Hohenzollerns in Prussia was natural 
enough. They typified the strength of beak, the 



SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS. 17 

power of talons and sweeping wings, wltich had 
made Prussia what she was. But nothing save a 
very remarkable train of surprising events could 
have brought the rest of Germany to share this 
affection and pride. 

The truth is, of course, that up to 1866 most other 
Germans disliked the Prussians thoroughly and 
vehemently, and decorated those head Prussians, 
the Hohenzollerns, with an extremity of antipathy. 
That brief war in Bohemia, with the consequent 
annexation of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, 
and Frankfort, did not inspire any new love for 
the Prussians anywhere, we may be sure, but it 
did open the eyes of other Germans to the fact 
that their sovereigns — Kings, Electors, Grand 
Dukes, and what not — were all collectively not 
worth the right arm of a single Hohenzollern. 

It was a good deal to learn even this—and, 
turning over this revelation in their minds, the 
Germans by 1871 were in a mood to move almost 
abreast of Prussia in the apotheosis of the victor 
of Sedan and Paris. To the end of old William's 
life in 1888, there was always more or less of the 
apotheosis about the Germans' attitude toward 
him. He was never quite real to them in the 
sense that Leopold is real in Brussels or Humbert 
in Rome. The German imagination always saw 
him as he is portrayed in the fine fresco by 
Wislicenus in the ancient imperial palace at 



i8 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

Goslar— a majestic figure, clad in modern war 
trappings yet of mythical aspect, surrounded, it 
is true, by the effigies of recognizable living Kings, 
Queens, and Generals, but escorted also by heroic 
ancestral shades, as he rides forward out of the 
canvas. Close behind him rides his son, Fritz, 
and he, too, following in the immediate shadow 
of his father to the last, lives only now in pic- 
tures and in sad musing dreams of what might 
have been. 

But William II — the young Kaiser and King — 
is a reality. He has won no battles. No antique 
legends wreathe their romantic mists about him. 
It has occurred to no artist to paint him on a 
palace wall, with the mailed shadows of medissval 
Barbarossas andConradsand Sigismunds overhead. 

The group of helmeted warriors who cluster 
about those two mounted figures in the Goslar 
picture, and who, in the popular fancy, bring 
down to our own time some of the attributes of 
mediaeval devotion and prowess — this group is 
dispersed now. Moltke, Prince Frederic Charles, 
Roon, Manteuffel, and many others are dead ; 
Blumenthal is in dignified retirement ; Bismarck 
is at Friedrichsruh. New men crowd the scene 
— clever organizers, bright and adroit parlia- 
mentarians, competent administrators, but still 
fashioned quite of our own clay — busy new men 
whom we may look at without hurting our eyes. 



SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERlSlS. 19 

For the first time, therefore, it is possible to 
study this prodigious new Germany, its rulers and 
its people, in a practical way, without being either 
dazzled by the disproportionate brilliancy of a few 
individuals or drawn into side-paths after pictur- 
esque unrealities. 

Three years of this new reign have shown us 
Germany by daylight instead of under the glamour 
and glare of camp fires and triumphal illumina- 
tions. We see now that tlic Hohenzollern stands 
out in the far front, and that the other German 
royalties, Wendish, Slavonic, heirs of Wittekind, 
portentously ancient barbaric dynasties of all 
sorts, are only vaguely discernible in the back- 
ground. During the lifetime of the old Kaiser it 
seemed possible that their eclipse might be of 
only a temporary nature. Nowhere can such an 
idea be cherished now. Young William dwarfs 
them all by comparison even more strikingly than 
did his grandfather. 

They all came to Berlin to do him homage at 
the opening of the Reichstag, which inaugurated 
his reign on June 25, 1888. They will never 
make so brave a show again ; even then they 
twinkled like poor tallow dips beside the shining 
personality of their young Prussian chief. 

Almost all of them are of royal lines older than 
that of the Hohenzollerns. Five of the principal 



20 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

personages among them — the King of Saxony, the 
Regent representing Bavaria's crazy King, the 
heir-apparent representing the semi-crazy King of 
Wiirtemberg, the Grand Duke of Baden, and the 
Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt — owe their titles 
in their present form to Napoleon, who paid their 
ancestors in this cheap coin for their wretched 
treason and cowardice in joining with him to 
crush and dismember Prussia. Now they are at 
the feet of Prussia, not indeed in the posture of 
conquered equals, but as liveried political subordi- 
nates. No such wiping out of sovereign authorities 
and emasculation of sovereign dignities has been 
seen before since Louis XI consolidated France 
500 years ago. Let us glance at some of these 
vanishing royalties for a moment, that we may 
the better measure the altitude to which the 
Hohenzollern has climbed. 

There was a long time during the last century 
when people looked upon Saxony as the most 
powerful and important State in the Protestant 
part of Germany. It is an Elector of Saxony who 
shines forth in history as Luther's best friend and 
resolute protector. For more than a hundred 
years thereafter Saxony led in the armed struggles 
of Protestantism to maintain itself against the 
leagued Catholic powers. 

Then, in 1694, there ascended the electoral 
throne the cleverest and most showy man of the 



SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS. 21 

whole Albertine family, who for nearly thirty 
years was to hold the admiring attention of 
Europe. We can see now that it was a purblind 
and debased Europe which believed August dev 
Starke to be a great man ; but in his own times 
there was no end to what he thought of himself or 
to what others thought of him. It was regarded 
as a superb stroke of policy when, in 1697, he got 
himself elected King of Poland — a promotion 
which inspired the jealous Elector of Branden- 
berg to proclaim himself King of Prussia four 
years later. August abjured Protestantism to 
obtain the Polish crown, and his descendants are 
Catholics to this day, though Saxony is strongly 
Protestant. August did many wonderful things 
in his time — made Dresden the superb city of 
palaces and museums it is, among other matters, 
and was the father of 354 natural children, as his 
own proud computation ran. A tremendous 
fellow, truly, who liked to be called the Louis 
XIV of Germany, and tried his best to live up to 
the ideal ! 

Contemporary observers would have laughed at 
the idea that Frederick William, the surly, bearish 
Prussian King, with his tobacco orgies and giant 
grenadiers, was worth considering beside the 
brilliant, luxurious, kingly August. Ah, "gay 
eupeptic son of Belial," where is thy dynasty 
now? 



22 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

There is to-day a King of Saxony, descended 
six removes from this August, who is distinctly 
the most interesting and valuable of these minor 
sovereigns. He is a sagacious, prudent, soldier- 
like man, nominal ruler of over three millions of 
people, actual Field Marshal in the German Army 
which has a Hohenzollern for its head. Although 
he really did some of the best fighting which the 
Franco-German war called forth, nobody outside 
his own court and German military circles knows 
much about it, or cares particularly about him. 
The very fact of his rank prevents his generalship 
securing popular recognition. If he had been 
merely of noble birth, or even a commoner, the 
chances are that he would now be chief of the 
German General Staff instead of Count von 
Schlieffen. Being only a king, his merits as a 
commander are comprehended alone by experts. 

There is just a bare possibility that this King 
Albert may be forced by circumstances out of his 
present obscurity. He is only sixty-three years 
old, and if a war should come within the next 
decade and involve defeat to the German Army in 
the field, there would be a strong effort made by 
the other subsidiary German sovereigns to bring 
him to the front as Generalissimo. 

As it is, his advice upon military matters is 
listened to in Berlin more than is generally known, 
but in other respects his position is a melancholy 



SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS. 23 

one. Even the kindliness with which the Kaisers 
have personally treated him since 1870, cannot 
but wear to him the annoying guise of patronage. 
He was a man of thirty-eight when his father, 
King John, was driven out of Dresden by Prussian 
troops, along with the royal family, and when for 
weeks it seemed probable that the whole kingdom 
of Saxony would be annexed to Prussia. Bis- 
marck's failure to insist upon this was bitterly 
criticised in Berlin at the time, and Gustav Frey- 
tag actually wrote a book deprecating the further 
independent existence of Saxony. Freytag and 
the Prussians generally confessed their mistake 
after the young Saxon Crown Prince's splendid 
achievement at Sedan; but that could scarcely 
wipe from his memory what had gone before, and 
even now, after the lapse of a quarter century, 
King Albert's delicate, clear-cut, white-whiskered 
face still bears the impress of melancholy stamped 
on it by the humiliations of 1866. 

Two other kings lurk much further back in the 
shadow of the Hohenzollern — idiotic Otto of 
Bavaria and silly Charles of Wiirtemberg. Of 
the former much has been written, by way of 
complement to the picturesque literature evoked 
by the tragedy of his strange brother Louis's 
death. In these two brothers the fantastic Wit- 
telsbach blood, filtering down from the Middle 
Ages through strata of princely scrofula and 



24 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

imperial luxury, clotted rankly in utter mad- 
ness. 

As for the King of Wiirtemberg, whose undig- 
nified experiences in the hands of foreign adven- 
turers excited a year or two ago the wonderment 
and mirth of mankind, he also pays the grievous 
penalty of heredity's laws. Writing thirty years 
back, Carlyle commented in this fashion upon the 
royal house of Stuttgart : " There is something of 
the abstruse in all these Beutelsbachers, from 
Ulric downwards — a mute ennui, an inexorable 
obstinacy, a certain streak of natural gloom 
which no illumination can abolish ; . . . articulate 
intellect defective: hence a strange, stiff perversity 
of conduct visible among them, often marring 
what wisdom they have. It is the royal stamp of 
Fate put upon these men — what are called fateful 
or fated men." ^ The present King Charles was 
personally an unknown quantity when this picture 
of his house was drawn. He is an old man now, 
and decidedly the most ** abstruse " of his whole 
family. 

Thus these two ancient dynasties of Southern 
Germany, which helped to make history for so 
many centuries, have come down into the mud. 
There is an elderly regent uncle in Bavaria who 
possesses sense and respectable abilities ; and in 

* " History of Friedrich II, of Prussia," book vii. chapter 
vi. 



SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS. 25 

Wiirtemberg there is an heir-apparent of forty- 
three, the product of a marriage between first 
cousins, who is said to possess ordinary intelli- 
gence. These will in time succeed to the thrones 
which lunacy and asininity hold now in commis- 
sion, but no one expects that they will do more 
than render commonplace what is now grotesquely 
impossible. 

Of another line which was celebrated a thousand 
years ago, and which flared into martial promin- 
ence for a little in its dying days, when this 
century was young, nothing whatever is left. The 
Fighting Brunswickers are all gone. 

They had a fair right to this name, had the 
Guelphs of the old homestead, for of the forty-five 
of them buried in the crypt of the Brunswick Burg 
Kirche nine fell on the battlefield. This direct 
line died out seven years ago with a curiously- 
original old Duke who bitterly resented the new 
order of things, and took many whimsical ways of 
showing his wrath. In the sense that he scorned 
to live in remodeled Germany, and defied Prussia 
by ostentatiously exhibiting his sympathy for the 
exiled Hanoverian house, he too may be said to 
have died fighting. The collateral Guelphs who 
survive in other lands are anything but fighters. 
The Prince of Wales is the foremost living male 
of the family, and Bismarck's acrid jeer that he 
was the only European Crown Prince whom one 



26 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

did not occasionally meet on the battlefield, 
though unjustly cruel, serves to point the differ- 
ence between his placid walk of life and the stormy 
careers of his mother's progenitors. Another 
Guelph, who is de jure heir to both Brunswick 
and Hanover — Ernest, Duke of Cumberland — 
has a larger strain of the ancestral Berserker 
blood, but alas ! no weapon remains for him but 
obdurate sulkiness. He buries himself in his 
sullen retreat at Gmunden in uncompromising 
rage, and the powers at Berlin have left off 
striving to placate him with money — his relatives 
not even daring now to broach the subject to him. 

And so there is an end to the Fighting Bruns- 
wickers, and a Hohenzollern has been put in 
their stead. Prince Albert of Prussia — a good, 
wooden, ceremonious man of large stature, who 
stands straight in jack boots and cuirass and is 
invaluable as an imposing family figure at christ- 
enings and funerals — reigns as Regent in Bruns- 
wick. So omnipotent are the Hohenzollerns 
grown that he was placed there without a 
murmur of protest — and when the time comes 
for the Prussian octopus to gather in this duchy, 
that also will be done in silence. 

Of the sixteen remaining sovereigns-below-the- 
salt, the Grand Duke of Baden is a fairly-able and 
wholly-amiable man, much engrossed in these 
latter days in the fact that his wife is the Kaiser's 



SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS. 27 

aunt. This makes him feel like one of the family, 
and he takes the aggrandizement of the Hohen- 
zollerns as quite a personal compliment. The 
venerable Duke Ernest, of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 
has an active mind and certain qualities which 
under other conditions might have made him a 
power in Germany. But Bismarck was far too 
rough an antagonist for him to cope with openly, 
and he fell into the feeble device of writing 
political pamphlets anonymously against the 
existing order of things, using the ingenuity of 
a jealous woman to circulate them and denying 
their authorship before he was accused. This 
has, of course, been fatal to his influence in the 
empire. Duke George, of Saxe-Meiningen, is 
another able and accomplished prince, who has 
devoted his energies and fortune to the establish- 
ment and perfecting of a very remarkable theatrical 
company. The rest are mere dead wood — presiding 
over dull little country Courts, wearing Prussian 
uniforms at parades and reviews, and desiring 
nothing else so much as the reception of invitations, 
to visit Berlin and shine in the reflected radiance 
of the HohenzoUern's smile. 

The word " invitations '* does indeed suggest 
that the elderly Prince Henry XIV, of Reuss- 
Schleiz, should receive separate mention, as having 
but recently abandoned a determined feud with 
Prussia. It is true that Keuss-Schleiz has only 



28 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

323 miles of territory and 110,000 people, but that 
did not prevent the feud being of an embittered, 
not to say menacing, character. When the invi- 
tations vv^ere sent out for the Berlin palace cele- 
bration of old Kaiser Wilhelm's ninetieth birthday, 
in 1887, by some accident Henry of Reuss-Schleiz 
v^^as overlooked. There are so many of these 
Reusses, all named Henry, all descended from 
Henry the Fowler, and all standing so erect with 
pride that they bend backward 1 The mistake 
was discovered in a day or two and a belated 
invitation sent, which Henry grumblingly ac- 
cepted. On the appointed day he arrived at the 
palace in Berlin and went up to the banqueting 
hall with the other princes. Being extremely 
near-sighted, he made a tour of the table, peering 
through his spectacles to discover his name-card. 
Horror of horrors ! No place had been provided 
for him, and everybody in the room had observed 
him searching for one ! Trembling with wrath, 
he stalked out, brushing aside the chamberlains 
who essayed to pacify him, and during that reign 
he never came to Berlin again. Not death itself 
could mollify him, for when Kaiser Wilhelm died 
the implacable Henr/ XIV, who personally owns 
most of his principality, refused his subjects a 
grant of land on which to rear a monument to his 
memory. But even he is reconciled to Berlin 
now. 



SUPREMACY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS. 29 

Thus with practical completeness had the 
ancient dynasties of old Germany been subordi- 
nated to and absorbed by the ascendency of the 
Hohenzollerns, when young William II stepped 
upon the throne. Thus, too, with this passing 
glance at their abasement or annihilation, the 
way is cleared for us to study the young chief of 
this mighty and consolidated Empire, to examine 
his personality and his power, and, by tracing 
their growth during the first three years of his 
reign, to forecast their ultimate mark upon the 
history of his time. 




William II. as a Boy. 

{From a photograph by Heinr. Graf, Berlin.) 



CHAPTER IL 



The young Emperor was born in the first month 
of 1859. 'The prolonged life of his grandfather, 
and the apparently superb physical vitality of his 
father, made him seem much further removed 
from the throne than fate really intended, and he 
grew up into manhood with only scant attention 
from the general public. There was an unex- 
pressed feeling that he belonged to the twentieth 
century, and that it would be time enough then to 
study him. When of a sudden the world learned 
that the stalwart middle-aged Crown Prince had a 
mortal malady, and saw that it was a race toward 
the grave between him and his venerable father, 
haste was made to repair this negligent error, and 
find out things about the hitherto unconsidered 
young man who was to be so prematurely called 
upon the stage. Unfortunately, this swift and un- 



34 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

expected shifting of history's lime-light revealed 
young William in extremely repellent colours. 
Many circumstances, working together in the 
shadows behind the throne, had combined to put 
him into a temporary attitude toward his parents, 
which showed very badly under this sudden and 
fierce illumination. " Ho, ho ! He is a bad son, 
then, is he ? " we all said, and made up our minds 
to dislike him on the spot. Three years have 
passed, and during that time many things have 
happened, many other things have come to light, 
calculated to convince us that this early judgment 
was an over-hasty one. 

So far as I have been able to learn, the first 
hint given to the world that there was a young 
Prince in Berlin distinctly worth watching ap- 
peared in the book " Societie de Berlin. Par le 
Comte Paul Vasili," published at the end of 1883. 
This volume was, perhaps, the cleverest of the 
anonymous series projected by a Parisian pub- 
lisher to make money out of the collected gossip 
and scandal of the chief European capitals, and 
utilized by more than one bright familiar of Mme. 
Adam's salon to pay off old grudges and market 
afresh moss-grown libels. The authorship of these 
books was never clearly established. There is a 
general understanding in Berlin that the one 
about that city was for the most part written by a 
Parisian journalist named Gerard, then stationed 



WILLIAM'S BOYHOOD. 35 

in Germany. At all events, the evidence w^as re- 
garded at the time as sufficient as to warrant his 
being chased summarily out of Berlin, while the 
book itself was prohibited, confiscated, almost 
burned by the common hangman. Perhaps 
Gerard, if he be still alive, might profitably return 
to Berlin now, for to him belongs the credit of 
having first put into type an intelligent character 
study of the young man who now monopolizes 
European attention. 

" The Prince William," said this anonymous 
writer, "is only twenty-four years of age. It is, 
therefore, difficult as yet to say what he will be- 
come ; but what is clearly apparent even now is 
that he is a young man of promise in mind and 
head and heart. He is by far the most intellectual 
of the Princes of this royal family. Withal 
courageous, enterprising, ambitious, hot-headed, 
but with a heart of gold, sympathetic in the 
highest degree, impulsive, spirited, vivacious in 
character, and gifted with a talent for repartee in 
conversation which would almost make the 
listener doubt his being a German. He adores 
the army, by which he is idolized in return. He 
has known how, despite his extreme youth, to win 
popularity in all classes of society. He is highly 
educated, well read, busies his mind with projects 
forthewelfareof his country, and hasastriking keen- 
ness of perception for everything relating to politics. 



36 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

** He will certainly be a distinguished man, and 
very probably a great sovereign. Prussia will 
perhaps have in him a second Frederic II, but 
minus his scepticism. In addition, he possesses 
a fund of gaiety and good humour that will soften 
the little angularities of character without which 
he would not be a true Hohenzollern. 

** He will be essentially a personal king — never 
allowing himself to be blindly led, and ruling with 
sound and direct judgment, prompt decision, 
energy in action, and an unbending will. When 
he attains the throne, he will continue the work of 
his grandfather, and will as certainly undo that of 
his father, whatever it may have been. In him 
the enemies of Germany will have a formidable 
adversary ; he may easily become the Henri IV 
of his country." 

I have ventured upon this extended extract 
from a book eight years old because the prophecy 
seems a remarkable one — ^far nearer what we see 
now to be the truth than any of the later predic- 
tions have turned out to be. " Paul Vasili " con- 
tinues his sketch with some paragraphs about the 
Prince's vast penchant for lower-class dissipated 
females, concluding with the warning that if ever 
he comes under the influence of a really able 
woman " it will be necessary to follow his actions 
with great caution." All this may be unhesitatingly 
put down to the French writer's imagination. 



WILLI A APS BO YHOOD. 37 

There is no city where more frankness about 
talking scandal exists than in Berlin, yet I have 
sought in vain to find any justification for this 
view of the Kaiser's character, either past or pre- 
sent. The impression brought from many talks 
with people who know him and his life intimately 
is that this special accusation is less true of him 
than of almost any other prince of his generation. 

William's boyhood was marked by one innova- 
tion in the family traditions of a HohenzoUern's 
training, the importance of which it is not easy to 
exaggerate. His father had been the first of these 
royal heirs to be sent to a university. He in his 
turn was the first to go to a public school. 

It is a solemn and portentous sort of thing — 
this training of a Hohenzollern. The progress of 
the family has been one long, sustained object 
lesson to the world on the value of education. 
No doubt it is in great part due to the influence of 
this standing example that Prussia leads the van 
of civilization in its proportion of scholars and 
teachers, and has made its name a synonym for 
all that is thorough and exhaustive in educational 
systems and theories. The dawn of this notion 
of a specially Spartan and severe practical school* 
ing for his heir, in the primitive and curiously- 
limited brain of the first King Frederic William, 
really marked an era in the world's conception of 
what education meant. 



38 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

We have all read, with swift-chasing mirth, won- 
der, incredulity and wrath, the stories of the way in 
which this luckless heir, afterward to be Frederic 
the Great, got his education stamped, beaten, 
burned, frozen, almost strangled into him. The 
account reads like a nightmare of lunatic savagery 
— yet in it were the germs of a lofty idea. From 
the brutal cudgeling, cursing, and manacling of 
Frederic's experience grew the tradition of a 
unique kind of training for a HohenzoUern prince. 
The very violence and wild barbarity of his treat- 
ment fixed the attention of the family upon the 
theor}'' of education — with very notable results. 

Historically we are all familiar with the exces- 
sive military twist given to this education of the 
youths born to be Kings of Prussia. The picture 
books are full of portraits of them — quaint little 
manikins dressed in officers' uniforms — stepping 
from the cradle into war's paraphernalia. The 
picture of the Great Fritz beating a drum at the 
age of three, of which the rapturous Carlyle makes 
so much, has its modern counterpart in the photo- 
graphs of the present child Crown Prince, clad in 
regimentals and saluting the camera, which are in 
every Berlin shop window. But another element 
of this stern regimen, not so much kept in view, is 
the absolute dependence of the son upon the father, 
or rather the King, which is insisted upon. 

We know to what abnormal lengths this ran in 



WILLIAM'S BOYHOOD. 39 

the youth and early manhood of Frederic the Great. 
It did not alter much in the next reign. In 1784, 
when this same Frederic was seventy-two years 
old, a travelling French noble was his guest at a 
great review in Silesia. There was also present 
the King's nephew and heir, who two years later 
was to ascend the throne as Frederic Wilham II, 
and who now was in his fortieth year. Yet of this 
forty-year-old Prince the Frenchman writes in his 
diary : " The heir presumptive lodges at a brewer's 
house, and in a very mean way ; is not allowed to 
sleep from home without permission from the 
King." 

The results in this particular instance were not 
of a flattering kind, and among the decaying forms 
of the dying eighteenth century — in an atmosphere 
poisoned by the accumulated putridities of that 
luxurious and evil epoch — even the Hohenzollern 
of the next generation was not a shining success. 
He was at least, however, much superior to the 
other German sovereigns of his time, and he had 
the unspeakable fortune, moreover, to be the 
husband of that Queen Louise who is enshrined 
as the patron saint of Prussian history. It was 
she who engrafted a humane spirit upon the rough 
drill-sergeant body of Hohenzollern education. 
She made her sons love her — and it seems but 
yesterday since the last of these sons, a tottering 
old man of ninety, used to go to the Charlotten- 



40 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

burg mausoleum on the anniversary of her death, 
and pray and weep in solitude beside the recum- 
bent marble effigy of the mother who had died in 
1810. 

The introduction of filial affection into the re- 
lation between Hohenzollern parents and children 
dates from this Queen Louise, and belongs to our 
own century. Before that it was the rule for the 
heirs of Prussia to detest their immediate pro- 
genitors. From the time of the Great Elector, 
every rising generation of this royal house sulked, 
cursed under its breath, went into opposition as 
far as it dared, and every fading generation dis- 
liked and distrusted those who were coming after 
it. Nor were these harsh relations confined to 
sovereign and heir. Wilhelmine, Margravine of 
Baireuth, records in her memoirs how, at the age 
of six, she was so much surprised at being fondled 
and caressed by her mother, on the latter's return 
from a prolonged journey, that she broke a blood- 
vessel.^ It seems safe to say that down to the 
family of Frederic William III and Louise, no 
other reigning race in Europe had ever managed 
to engender so much bitterness and bad blood 
between elders and juniors within its domestic 
fold. 

The change then was abrupt. The two older 

' " Memoirs of Wilhelmine, Margravine of Baireuth," trans- 
lated by H.R.H. Princess Christian, London, 1887, p. 10. 



WILLIAM'S BOYHOOD, 41 

boys of this family, Frederic William IV and 
William I, lived lives as young men which v^ere 
poems of filial reverence and tenderness. The 
cruel misfortunes of the Napoleonic wars made 
the mutual affection within this hunted and home- 
less royal family very sweet and touching. Perhaps 
the most interesting of all the reminiscences called 
forth by the death of the old Kaiser was furnished 
by the publication of the letters he wrote as a 
young man to his father — that strange corres- 
pondence which reveals him resolutely breaking 
his own heart and tearing from it the image of the 
Princess Radziwill, in loving obedience to his 
father's wish. 

This trait of filial piety did not loom so largely 
in William's son, the late Frederic III, as one or 
two random allusions in his diary show. And in 
his son, in turn, its pulse beats with such varying 
and intermittent fervour that sometimes one misses 
it altogether. 

Young William, as has been said, was the first 
of his race to be sent to a public school, the big 
gymnasium at Cassel being selected for the pur- 
pose. The innovation was credited at the time to 
the eccentric liberalizing notions of his mother, 
the English Crown Princess. The old Kaiser did 
not like the idea, and Bismarck vehemently 
opposed it, but the parents had their way, and at 
the age of fifteen the lad went, along with hi§ 



42 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

twelve-year-old brother Henry, and their tutor, 
Dr. Hinzpeter. They were lodged in an old 
schloss, which had been one of the Electoral 
residences, and out of school hours maintained a 
considerable seclusion. But in the school itself 
William was treated quite like any ordinary citi- 
zen's son. 

It may have been a difficult matter for some of 
the teachers to act as if they were unconscious that 
this particular pupil was the heir of the Hohenzol- 
lerns, but men who were at the school at the time 
assure me they did so, with only one exception. 
This solitary flunkey, knowing that William was 
more backward in his Greek than most of his 
class, sought to curry favour with the Prince by 
warning him that the morrow's examination was 
to be, let us say, upon a certain chapter of 
Xenophon. The boy William received this hint 
in silence, but early the next morning went down 
to the classroom and wrote upon the blackboard in 
big letters the information he had received, so that 
he might have no advantage over his fellows. 
This struck me when I heard it as a curious 
illustration of the boy's character. There seems 
to have been no excited indignation at the mean- 
ness of the tutor — but only the manifestation of a 
towering personal and family pride, which would 
not allow him to win a prize through profiting 
by knowledge withheld from the others. 



WILLIAM'S BOYHOOD. 43 

During his three jears at Cassel William was 
very democratic in his intercourse with the other 
boys. He may have been helped to this by the 
fact that he was one of the worst-dressed boys in 
the school — in accordance with an ancient family 
rule which makes the HohenzoUern children wear 
out their old clothes in a way that would astonish 
the average grocer's progeny. He was only an 
ordinary scholar so far as his studies went. At 
that time his brother Henry, who went to a 
different school, was conspicuously the brighter 
pupil of the two. Those who were at Cassel with 
the future Emperor have the idea that he was 
contented there, but he himself, upon reflection, is 
convinced that he did not like it. At all events, 
he gathered there a very intimate knowledge of 
the gymnasium system which, as will be seen later 
on, he now greatly disapproves. 

At the age of eighteen William left Cassel and 
entered upon his university course at Bonn. Here 
his tutor, Hinzpeter, who had been his daily 
companion and mentor from childhood, parted 
company with him, and the young Prince passed 
into the hands of soldiers and men of the world. 
The change marks an important epoch in the 
formation of his character. 

There is a photograph of him belonging to the 
earlier part of this Cassel period which depicts a 
refined, gentle, dreamy-faced German boy, with a 



44 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

soft, girlish chin, small arched lips with a sugges- 
tion of dimples at the corners, and fine meditative 
eyes. The forehead, though not broad, is of fair 
height and fulness. The dominant effect of the 
face is that of sweetness. Looking at it, one 
instinctively thinks ** How fond that boy's parents 
must have been of him 1 " And they were fond in 
the extreme. 

In the Crown Prince Frederic's diary, written 
while the German headquarters were at Versailles, 
are these words : — 

" This is William's thirteenth birthday. May he grow up to be an able, 
honest, and upright man, a true German, prepared to continue without prejudice 
what has now been begun! Heaven be praised ; between him and us there is a 
simple, hearty, and natural relationship, which we shall strive to preserve, so that 
he may thus always look upon us as his best and truest friends. It is really an 
oppressive reflection when one realizes what hopes have already been placed on 
the head of this child, and how great is our responsibility to the nation for 
his education, which family considerations and questions of rank, and the 
whole Court life at Berlin and other things will tend to make so much more 
difficult." 

The retirement of Dr. Hinzpeterfrom his charge 
was an event the significance of which recent 
occurrences have helped us to appreciate. When 
history is called upon to make her final summing 
up upon William's character and career, she will 
allot a veiy prominent place to the influence of 
this relatively unknown man. A curious romance 
of time's revenge hangs about Dr. Hinzpeter. He 
is a native of the Westphalian manufacturing 
town, Bielefeld, and was a poor young tutor at 
Darmstadt when he was recomniended to the 



WILLIAM'S BOYHOOD. 45 

parents of William as one exceptionally fitted to 
take charge of their son. The man who gave this 
recommendation was the then Mr. Robert Morier, 
British Minister at Darmstadt. Nearly a quarter 
of a century later Sir Robert Morier was able to 
see his ancient and implacable enemy, Bismarck, 
tripped, thrown, and thrust out of power, and to 
sweeten the spectacle by reflecting that he owed 
this ideal vengeance to the work of the tutor he 
had befriended in the old Darmstadt days. 

It is more than probable that the idea of send- 
ing the young Prince to the Cassel gymnasium 
originated with Dr. Hinzpeter. At all events, we 
know that he held advanced and even extreme 
views as to the necessity of emphasizing the popu- 
lar side of the Hohenzollern tradition. 

This Prussian family has always differed radi- 
cally from its other German neighbours in profess- 
ing to be solicitous for the poor people rather than 
for the nobility's privileges and claims. Some- 
times this has sunk to be a profession merely ; 
more often it has been an active guiding principle. 
The lives of the second and third Kings of Prussia 
are filled with the most astonishing details of vigi- 
lant, ceaseless intermeddling in the affairs of 
peasant farmers, artisans, and wage-earners 
generally, hearing complaints, spying out injustice, 
and roughly seeing wrongs righted. When Prus- 
sia grew too big to be thus paternally administered 



46 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

by a King poking about on his rounds with a rattan 
and a taker of notes, the tradition still survived. 
We find traces of it all along down to our times in 
the legislation of the Diet in the direction of what 
is called State Socialism. 

Dr. Hinzpeter felt the full inspiration of this 
tradition. He longed to make it more a reality in 
the mind of his princely pupil than it had ever 
been before. Thus it was that the lad was sent to 
Cassel, to sit on hard benches with the sons of 
simple citizens, and to get to know what the life 
of the people was like. Years afterwards this in- 
spiration was to bear fruit. 

But in 1877 the work of creating an ideally 
democratic and popular HohenzoUern was abruptly 
interrupted. Dr. Hinzpeter went back to Biele- 
feld, and young William entered the University of 
Bonn. The soft-faced, gentle-minded boy, still 
full of his mother's milk, his young mind sweetened 
and strengthened by the dreams of clemency, com- 
passion, and earnest searchings after duty which 
he had imbibed from his teacher, suddenly found 
himself transplanted in new ground. The atmos- 
phere was absolutely novel. Instead of being a 
boy among boys, he all at once found himself a 
prince amongst aristocratic toadies. In place of 
Hinzpeter, he had a military aide given him for 
principal companion, friend, and guide. 

These next few years at the Rhenish university 



WILLIAM'S BOYHOOD. 47 

did not, we see now, wholly efface what Dr. Hinz- 
peter had done. But they obscured and buried 
his work, and reared upon it a superstructure of 
another sort — a different kind of William, redolent 
of royal pretensions and youthful self-conceit, 
delighting in the rattle and clank of spurs and 
swords and dreaming of battlefields. 

Poor Hinzpeter, in his Bielefeld retreat, could 
have had but small satisfaction in learning of the 
growth of the new William. The parents at Pots- 
dam, too, who had built such loving hopes upon 
the tender and gracious promise of boyhood — they 
could not have been happy either. 



CHAPTER III. 

UNDER CHANGED INFLUENCES AT BONN. 

The act of matriculation at Bonn meant to young 
William many things apart from the beginning of 
a university career. In fact, it was almost a sign 
of his emancipation from academic studies. He 
was a student among students in only a formal 
sense. The theory of a complete civic education 
was respected by his attendance at certain lectures, 
and by his perfunctory compliance with sundry 
university regulations. But, in reality, he now 
belonged to the army. He had attained his 
majority, like other Prussian princes, at the age 
of eighteen, and thereupon had been given his 
Second Lieutenant's commission in the First Foot 
Regiment of the Guards, where his father had 
been trained before him. The routine of his 
military service, and the exigencies of the martial 
education which now supplanted all else, kept 
him much more in Berlin than at Bonn. 



50 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

Both at the Prussian capital and Rhenish uni- 
versity town he now wore his uniform, his sword, 
and his epaulets, and, chin well in air, sniffed his 
fill of the incense burned before him by the young 
men of the army. The glitter and colour of the 
parade ground, the peremptory discipline, the 
sense of power given by these superb wheeling 
lines and walls of bayonets and exact geometrical 
movements as of some mighty machine, fascinated 
his imagination. He threw himself into military 
work with feverish eagerness. Pacific Cassel, with 
its gymnasium and the kindly figure of the tutor, 
Hinzpeter, faded away into a remote memory of 
childhood. 

Public events, meanwhile, had been working 
out a condition of affairs which gave a marked 
importance to this change in William's character. 
The German peoples, having got over the first rapt 
enthusiasm at beholding their ancient Prankish 
enemy rolled in the dust at their feet, and at find- 
ing themselves once more all together under an 
imperial German flag, began to devote attention 
to domestic politics. It was high time that they 
did so. 

Prussia had roared as gently as any sucking 
dove the while the question was still one of entic- 
ing the smaller German States into the federated 
empire. But once the Emperor-King felt his 
footing secure upon the imperial throne, the old 



UNDER CHANGED INFLUENCES AT BONN. 51 

hungry Hohenzollem blood began stirring in his 
veins. His great Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, 
needed no prompting; every fibre of his bulky 
frame responded intuitively to this inborn Prussian 
instinct of aggrandisement. Together these two 
began putting the screws upon the minor States. 
"Solidifying the Empire" was what they called 
their work. The Hohenzollerns were always 
notable ** solidifiers," as their neighbours have had 
frequent occasion to observe tearfully during the 
last three centuries. 

The humiliation and expulsion of Austria had 
been the pivot upon which the creation of the new 
Germany turned. In its most obvious aspect this 
had appeared to all men to be the triumph of a 
Protestant over a Catholic power. Later events 
had contributed to associate Prussia's ascendency 
with the religious issue. The great Q])cumenical 
Council at Rome had been followed by a French 
declaration of war, which every good Lutheran 
confidently ascribed to the dictation of the Jesuits. 

These things grouped themselves together in 
the public mind just as similar arguments did in 
England in the days of the Armada. To be a 
Catholic grew to seem synonymous with being a 
sympathizer with Austria and France. It is an 
old law of human action that if you persistently 
impute certain views to a man, and persecute him 
on account of them, the effect is to reconcile his 



52 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

mind to those views. The melancholy history of 
theologico-political quarrels is peculiarly filled 
with examples of this. The Catholics of Germany 
were in the main as loyal to the idea of imperial 
unity as their Protestant neighbours, and they had 
shed their blood quite as freely to establish it as a 
fact. Their bishpps and priests had over and 
over again testified by deeds their independence of 
Rome in matters which affected them as Germans. 
But when they found Bismarck ceaselessly insist- 
ing that they were hostile to Prussia, it was natural 
enough that they should discover that they did 
dislike his kind of a Prussia, and that some of the 
least cautious among them should say so. 

Prussia's answer — coming with the promptness 
of deliberate preparation — was the Kulturkampf, 
Into the miserable chaos which followed we need 
not go. Bishops were exiled or imprisoned ; 
schools were broken up and Catholic professors 
chased from the universities ; a thousand parishes 
were bereft of their priests ; the whole empire was 
filled with angry suspicions, recriminations, and 
violence, hot-tempered roughness on one side, grim 
obstinacy of hate on the other — to the joy of all 
Germany's enemies outside and the confusion of 
all her friends. 

Despotism begets lawlessness, and Bismarck 
and old William, busy with their priest hunt, 
suddenly discovered that out of this disorder had 



UNDER CHANGED INFLUENCES AT BONN 53 

somehow sprouted a strange new thing called 
Socialism. They halted briefly to stamp this evil 
growth out — and lo ! from an upper window of the 
beer house on Unter den Linden, called the Three 
Ravens, the Socialist Nobiling iired two charges 
of buckshot into the head and shoulders of the 
aged Emperor, riddhng his helmet like a sieve and 
laying him on a sick bed for the ensuing six 
months. 

As a consequence, the Crown Prince Frederic 
was installed as Regent from June till December 
of 1878, and from this period dates young William's 
public attitude of antagonism to the policy of his 
parents. 

For the present we need examine this only in 
its outer and political phases. It is too much, 
perhaps, to say that heretofore there had been no 
divisions inside the Hohenzollern family. The 
Crown Prince and his English wife had been in 
tacit opposition to the Kaiser-Chancellor regime 
for many years. But this opposition took on 
palpable form and substance during the Regency 
of 1878. 

A new Pope — the present Leo XIII — had been 
elected only a few months before, and with him 
the Regent Frederic opened a personal corre- 
spondence, with a view to compromising the 
unhappy religious wrangles which were doing such 
injury to Germany. The letters written from 



54 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

Berlin were models of gentle firmness and wise 
statesmanship, and they laid a foundation of con- 
ciliatory understanding upon which Bismarck 
afterward gladly reared his superstructure of 
partial settlement when the time came for him 
to need and bargain for the Clerical vote in the 
Reichstag. But at the time their friendly tone 
gave grave offence to the Prussian Protestants, 
and was peculiarly repugnant to the Junker court 
circles of Berlin. 

It is no pleasant task to picture to one's self the 
grief and chagrin with which the Regent and his 
wife must have noted that their elder son ranged 
himself among their foes. The change which had 
been wrought in him during the year in the 
regiment and at Bonn revealed itself now in open 
and unmistakable fashion. Prince William osten- 
tatiously joined himself with those who criticised 
the Regent. He assiduously cultivated the friend- 
ship of the men who led hostile attacks upon his 
parents. He had his greatest pride in being known 
for a staunch supporter of Bismarck, a firm believer 
in divine right, Protestant supremacy, and all the 
other catchwords of the absolutist party. The 
praises which these reactionary people sang in his 
honour mounted like the fumes of spirits to his 
young brain. Instinctively he began posing as the 
Hope of the Monarchy — as the providential young 
prince, handsome, wise and strong, who was in 



UNDER CHANGED INFLUENCES AT BONN. 55 

good time to ascend the throne and gloriously 
undo all that the weak dreamer, his father, had 
done toward liberalizing the institutions of Prussia 
and Germany. 

A lamentable and odious attitude this, truly ! 
Yet, which of us was wholly wise at nineteen ? 
And which of us, it may be added fairly, has 
encountered such magnificent and overpowering 
temptations to foolishness as these that beset 
young William ? 

Remember that all his associates, alike in his 
daily routine with his regiment or at the University 
and in his larger intercourse among the aristo- 
cratic social circles of Berlin, took only one view 
of this subject. At their head were Bismarck, the 
most powerful and impressive personality in 
Europe, and the aged Emperor, the one furiously 
inveighing against the manner in which the Pro- 
testant religion and political security were being 
endangered, the other deploring from his sick-bed 
the grievous inroads which were threatened upon 
the personal rights and prerogatives of the Hohen- 
zollerns. It is not strange that young William 
adopted the opinion of his grandfather and of 
Bismarck, chiming as it did with the new impulses 
of militarism that had risen so strongly within 
him, and being re-echoed, as it was, from the lips 
of all his friends. 

But the event of this brief Regency which most 



56 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

clearly marked the chasm separating the Crown 
Prince from the Junker circles of his son's adop- 
tion, was the appointment of Dr. Friedberg to 
high office. And this is particularly worth study- 
ing, because its effects are still felt in German 
social and political life. 

Dr. Friedberg was then a man of sixty-five, and 
one of the most distinguished jurists of Germany. 
He had adorned a responsible post in the Ministry 
of Justice for over twenty years, and had written 
numerous valuable works, those relating to his 
special subject of prison reform and the efficacy of 
criminal law in social improvement standing in 
the very front rank of literature of that kind. His 
promotion, however, had been hopelessly blocked 
by two considerations ; he was professedly a 
Liberal in politics and a close friend of the Crown 
Prince and Princess, and, what was still worse, he 
was a Jew. 

On the second day of his Regency, Frederic 
astounded and scandalized aristocratic Berlin by 
appointing Dr. Friedberg to the highest judicial- 
administrative post in the kingdom. To glance 
forward for a moment, it may be noted that when 
old Kaiser Wilhelm returned to active power in 
December, he refused to remove Friedberg, out of 
a feeling of loyalty to his son's actions as Regent. 
But he vented his wrath in another way by con- 
spicuously neglecting to give Friedberg the Bl^ck 



UNDER CHANGED INFLUENCES AT BONN 57 

Eagle after he had served nine years in the 
Ministry, though all his associates obtained the 
decoration upon only six years' service. This 
slight upon the Hebrew Minister explains the 
well-remembered action of Frederic, when he was 
on his journey home from San Remo to ascend 
the throne after his father's death : — as the 
Ministerial delegation met his train at Leipsic, 
and entered the carriage, he took the Black Eagle 
from his own neck and placed it about that of 
Friedberg. 

This action of the emotional sick man, returning 
through the March snowstorm to play his brief 
part of phantom Kaiser, created much talk in 
Germany three years ago, and Friedberg, upon the 
strength of it, plumed himself greatly as the chief 
friend of the new monarch. He was the first Jew 
ever decorated by that exalted and exclusive Black 
Eagle — and during the short reign of ninety-nine 
days he held himself like the foremost man in the 
Empire. 

It is a melancholy reflection that this mean- 
spirited old man, as soon as Frederic died, made 
haste to lend himself to the work of blackening 
his benefactor's memory. He had owed more to 
Frederic's friendship and loyalty than any other in 
Germany, and he requited the debt to the dead 
Kaiser with such base ingratitude that even 
Frederic's enemies were disgusted, and, under the 



58 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

pressure of general disfavour, he had soon to quit 
his post. But enough of Friedberg's unpleasant 
personality. Let us return to 1878. 

The Regent's action in giving Prussia a Jewish 
Minister lent an enormous original impulse to the 
anti-Semitic movement in BerHn, which soon grew 
into a veritable Judenhetze, This Jewish question, 
while it ran its course of excitement in Germany, 
completely dwarfed the earlier clerical issue, just 
as it in turn has been submerged by the rising tide 
of Socialistic agitation. But though the anti- 
Semitic party has ceased to exert any power at the 
polls the feeling back of it is still a potent factor 
in Berlin life. 

In the new Berlin, of which I shall speak 
presently, the Jews occupy a more commanding 
and dominant position than they have ever had in 
any other important city since the fall of Jerusalem. 
For this the Germans have themselves largely 
to blame. The military bent of the ascendant 
Prussians has warped the whole Teutonic mind 
toward unduly glorifying the army. The prizes of 
German upper-class life are all of a military sort. 
Every nobleman's son, every bright boy in the 
wealthier citizens' stratum, aspires to the uniform. 
The tacit rule which excludes the Jews from 
positions in this epauletted aristocracy drives 
them into the other professions. They may not 
wear the sword: they revenge themselves by 



UNDER CHANGED INFLUENCES AT BONN. 59 

owning the vast bulk of the newspapers, by writing 
most of the books, by almost monopolizing law, 
medicine, banking, architecture, engineering, and 
the more intellectual branches of the civil service. 

This preponderance of Hebrews in the liberal pro- 
fessions seems unnatural to the Tory German, who 
has vainly tried to break it down by political action 
and by social ostracism. These attempts in turn 
have thrown the Jews into opposition. Of the 
seven Israelites in the present Reichstag six are 
Socialist Democrats and one is a Freisinnige 
leader. Every paper in Germany owned or edited 
by a Jew is uncompromisingly Radical in its poli- 
tics. This in turn further exasperates the German 
Tories and keeps alive the latent fires of hatred 
which bigots like Stocker from time to time fan 
into flame. 

In finance, too, the German aristocrats find 
themselves getting more and more helplessly into 
Jewish hands. Their wonderful new city of 
Berlin not only acts as a sieve for the great wave 
of Hebrew migration steadily moving westward 
from Russia, but it is becoming the Jewish banking 
and money centre of Europe. The grain trade of 
Russia is concentrated in Berlin. To buy wheat 
from Odessa you apply to one of the three hundred 
Jewish middleman firms at Berlin. To borrow 
money in Europe you go with equal certainty to 
Berlin. The German nobleman was never very 



6o THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

rich ; he has of late years become distinctly poor 
—and all the mortgages which mar his sleep o' 
nights are locked in Jewish safes at Berlin. 

To revenge himself the German aristocrat can 
only assume an added contempt for literature and 
the peaceful professions generally because they are 
Jewish ; insist more strongly than ever that the 
army is the only place for German gentlemen 
because it is not Jewish, and dream of the time 
when a beneficent fate shall once more hand 
Jerusalem over to conquest and rapine. 

This German nobleman, however, does not 
disdain in the meanwhile to lend himself to the 
spoliation of the loathed tribes when chance offers 
itself. There is a famous Jewish banker in Berlin, 
who, in his senile years, is weak enough to desire 
social position for his children. One of his sons, 
a stupid and debauched youngster, is permitted to 
associate with sundry fashionable German officers 
— ^just up to the point where he loses his money to 
them with sufficient regularity — and, of course, 
never gets an inch beyond that point. 

A daughter of this old banker had an even more 
disastrous experience. She was an ugly girl, but 
with her enormous dower the ambitious parents 
were able to buy a titled husband in the person of 
a penniless German Baron. Delighted with this 
success, the banker settled upon the couple a 
handsome estate in Silesia, The Baron and his 



UNDER CHANGED INFLUENCES AT BONN 6i 

bride were provided with a special train to convey 
them to their future home, and in that very train 
the Baron installed his mistress, and with her a 
lawyer friend who had already arranged for the 
sale of the estate. The Jewish bride arrived in 
Silesia to find herself contemptuously deserted by 
her husband and robbed of her estate. She 
returned to Berlin, obtained a divorce, and as soon 
as might be was married again — this time to a 
diamond merchant of her own race. 

As for the Baron who perpetrated this unspeak- 
ably brutal and callous outrage, I did not learn 
that he had lost caste among his friends by the 
exploit. Indeed, the story was told to me as a 
merry joke on the Jews. 

Prince Bismarck, almost alone among the J unker 
group, did not associate himself with this anti- 
Semitic agitation. In the work which he was 
carrying forward Jewish bankers were extremely 
useful. Both in a visibly regular way, and by 
subterranean means, capitalists like Bleichroder 
played a most important part in his performance 
of the task of centralizing power at Berlin. 
Hence he always held aloof from the movement 
against the Jews, and on occasions made his 
dislike for it manifest. 

Doubtless it was his counsel which restrained 
the impetuous young William from openly identi- 
fying himself with this bigoted and proscriptive 



62 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

demonstration. At all events, the youthful Prince 
avoided any overt sign of his sympathy with the 
anti-Jewish outcry, yet continued to find all his 
friends among the class which supported the 
Judenhetze, It seems a curious fact now that in 
those days he created the impression of a silent 
and reserved young man — almost taciturn. As to 
where his likes and dislikes lay, no uncertainty 
existed. He was heart and soul with the aristo- 
cratic Court party and against all the tendencies 
and theories of the small academic group attached 
to his father. He made this obvious enough by 
his choice of associations, but kept a dignified 
curb on his tongue. 

In addition to his course of studies at Bonn 
and his practical labours with his regiment, the 
Prince devoted a set amount of time each week 
to instruction of a less common order. He had 
regular weekly appointments with two very dis- 
tinguished professors — the Emperor William, who 
spoke on Kingcraft, and Chancellor Bismarck, 
whose theme was Statecraft. The former series 
of discourses was continued almost without inter- 
mission, even during the old Kaiser's period of 
retirement after Nobiling's attempt on his life. 
The Prince saw these eminent instructors regu- 
larly, but it did not enter into their scheme of 
education that he should profess to learn anything 
from his father. 



UNDER CHANGED INFLUENCES AT BONN. 63 

Among the ideas which the impressionable 
young man imbibed from Bismarck there could 
be nothing calculated to increase his filial affec- 
tion or respect. Bismarck had cherished a bitter 
dislike for the English Crown Princess, con- 
ceived even before her marriage, at a time when 
she represented to him only the girlish embodi- 
ment of an impolitic matrimonial alliance, and 
strengthened year by year after she came to Berlin 
to live. He did not scruple to charge to a con- 
spiracy between her and the Empress Augusta all 
the political obstacles which from time to time 
blocked his path. He not only believed, but openly 
declared, that the Crown Princess was responsible 
for the whole Arnim episode ; and it is an open 
secret that even the State papers emanating from 
the German Foreign Office during his Chancellor- 
ship contain the grossest and most insulting allu- 
sions to her. As for the Crown Prince, Bismarck 
was at no pains to conceal his contempt for one 
of whom he habitually thought as a henpecked 
husband. 

Enough of this feeling about his parents must 
have filtered through into young William's mind, 
from his intercourse with the powerful Chancellor, 
to render any reassertion of parental influence im- 
possible. 

In the summer of 1880 the Emperor and his 
Chancellor decided that it was time for their 

5 



64 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

pupil to marry, and they selected for his bride an 
amiable, robust and comely-faced German princess 
of the dispossessed Schleswig-Holstein family. I 
gain no information anywhere as to William's 
parents having been more than formally consulted 
in this matter — and no hint that William himself 
took any deep personal interest in the transaction. 
The marriage ceremony came in February of 1881, 
and William was now installed in a residence of his 
own — the pretty little Marble Palace at Potsdam. 
His daily life remained otherwise unaltered. He 
worked hard at his military and civil tasks, 
and continued to pose— not at all through mere 
levity of character, but inspired by a genuine, if 
misguided, sense of duty — as the darling of all 
reactionary elements in modern Germany. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE TIDINGS OF FREDERIC'S DOOM. 

Six years of married and semi-independent life 
went by, and left Prince William of Prussia but 
little changed. He worked diligently up through 
the grades of military training and responsibility, 
fulfilling all the pubHc duties of his position with 
exactness, but showing no inclination to create a 
separate role in the State for himself The young 
men of the German upper and middle classes, 
alive with the new spirit of absolutism and lust for 
conquest with which boyish memories of 1870 
imbued their minds, looked toward him and spoke 
of him as their leader that was to be when their 
generation should come into its own — but that 
seemed something an indefinite way ahead. He 
could afford to wait silently. 

His summer home at Marmorpalais, charmingly 
situated on the shore of the Heiligen Sea at Pots* 



66 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

dam, did not in any obvious sense become a 
political centre. The men who came to it were 
chiefly hard-working oflicers, and the talk of their 
scant leisure, over wine and cigars, was of military 
tasks, hunting experiences, and personal gossip 
rather than of graver matters. The library, which 
was William's workroom in these days, has most 
of its walls covered with racks arranged to hold 
maps, presumably for strategic studies and Krieg- 
spiel work. The next most important piece of 
furniture in the room is a tall cabinet for cigars. 
The bookcase is much smaller. 

When winter came Prince William and his 
family returned to their apartments in the Schloss 
at Berlin. Nurses clad in the picturesque Wendish 
dress of the Spreewald bore an increasing promi- 
nent part in this annual exodus from Potsdam — 
for almost every year brought its new male Hohen- 
zollern. 

Thus the early spring of 1887 found William, 
now past his twenty-eighth year, a major, com- 
manding a battalion of Foot guards, the father of 
four handsome, sturdy boys, and two lives removed 
from the throne. 

Then came, without warning, one of those terri- 
ble, world-changing moments wherein destiny 
reveals her face to the awed beholder — moments 
about which the imagination of the outside public 
lingers with curiosity forever unsatisfied, Nq 



THE TIDINGS OF FREDERICS DOOM. 67 

one will ever tell what happens in that soul-trying 
instant of time, We shall never know, for ex- 
ample, just what William felt and thought one 
March day in 1887, when somebody — identity 
unknown to us as well — whispered in his ear that 
the Crown Prince, his father, had a cancer in the 
throat. 

The world heard this sinister news some weeks 
later, and was so grieved at the intelligence that 
for over a year thereafter it fostered the hope of 
its falsity, and was even grateful to courtier phy- 
sicians and interested flatterers who encouraged 
this hope. Civilization had elected Frederic to a 
place among its heroes, and clung despairingly to 
the belief that his life might, after all, be saved. 

But in the inner family circle of the Hohen- 
zollerns there was from the first no illusion on this 
point. The old Emperor and his Chancellor and 
the Prince William knew that the malady was 
cancerous. Their information came from Ems, 
whither Frederic went upon medical advice in the 
spring of 1887, to be treated for *' a bad cold with 
bronchial complications." Later a strenuous and 
determined attempt was made to represent the 
disease as something else, and out of this grew 
one of the most painful and cruel domestic trage- 
dies known to history. At this point it is enough 
to say that the Emperor and his grandson knew 
about the cancer before even rumours of it reached 



68 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

the general public, and that their belief in its fatal 
character remained unshaken throughout. 

To comprehend fully and fairly what followed, 
it will be necessary to try to look at Frederic 
through the e3^es of the Court party. The view 
of him which we of England and America take 
has been, beyond doubt, of great and lasting 
service to the human race — in much the same 
sense that the world has been benefited by the 
idealized purities and sweetnesses of the Arthurian 
legend. We are helped by our heroes in this 
practical, work-a-day, modern world as truly as 
were our pagan fathers who followed the sons of 
Woden. Every one of us is the richer and stronger 
for this image of Frederic the Noble which the 
English-speaking peoples have erected in their 
Valhalla. 

But it is fair to reflect, on the other hand, that 
this fine, handsome, able, and good-hearted Prince 
could not have created for himself such hosts of 
hostile critics in his own country, could not have 
continually found himself year by year losing his 
hold upon even the minority of his fellow-country- 
men, without reason. It is certain that in 1886 
— the year before his illness befell — he had come 
to a minimum of usefulness, influence, and popu- 
larity in the Empire. Deplore this as we may, it 
would be unintelligent to refuse to inquire into its 
pauses. 




Frederic III. 

{Front a photograJ>h by Fkanz Hankstaengl, Mtinc/ien.') 



THE TIDINGS OF FREDERICS DOOM. 71 

Moreover, we are engaged upon the study of 
a living man, holding a great position, possibly 
destined to do great things. All our thoughts of 
this living man are instinctively coloured by pre- 
judices based upon his relations with his father, 
who is dead. Justice to William demands that we 
shall strive fairly to get at the opinions and feelings 
which swayed him and his advisers in their atti- 
tude of antagonism to our hero, his father. 

His critics say that Frederic was an actor. 
They do not insist upon his insincerity — in fact, 
for the most part credit him with honesty and 
candour — but regard him as the victim of here- 
ditary histrionism. His mother, the late Empress 
Augusta, had always impressed Berliners in the 
same wa}^ — as playing in the role of an exiled 
Princess, with her little property Court acces- 
sories, her little tea-party circle of imitation 
French littemteurSf and her "Mrs. Haller" sighs 
and headshakings over the coarseness and cruelty 
of the big roaring world outside. And her grand- 
father was that play-actor gone mad. Czar Paul of 
Russia, who tore the passion so into tatters that 
his own sons rose and killed him. 

Once given the key to this view of Frederic's 
character, a strange cloud of corroborative wit- 
nesses are at hand. Take one example. Most 
of the pictures of him drawn at the period of his 
greatest popularity — during and just after the 



72 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

Franco-German war — pourtray him with a long- 
bowled porcelain pipe in his hand. The artists 
in the field made much of this : every war cor- 
respondent wrote about it. The effect upon the 
public mind was that of a kindly, unostentatious, 
pipe-loving burgher — and so lasting was it that 
when, seventeen years later, he was attacked by 
cancer, many good people hastened to ascribe it 
to excessive smoking. I had this same notion, 
too, and therefore was vastly surprised, in Berlin, 
years after, when a General Staff officer told me 
that Frederic rather disliked tobacco. I instanced 
the familiar pictures of him with his pipe. The 
instant reply was : " Ah, yes, that was like him.. 
He always carried a pipe about at headquarters to 
produce an impression of comradeship on the 
soldiers, although it often made him sick." 

It was hard work to credit this theory — until 
it was confirmed by a passage in Sir Morell 
Mackenzie's book. In rCvSponse to the physician's 
question, Frederic said the report of his being a 
great smoker was " quite untrue, and that for 
many years he had hardly smoked at all." He 
added that probably this report, coming from 
soldiers who had seen him sometimes solacing 
himself after a hard-fought battle with a pipe, 
had given him his " perfectly undeserved reputa- 
tion " as a devotee of tobacco.^ 

' "The Fatal Illness of Frederic the Noble," p. 20. 



THE TIDINGS OF FREDERICS DOOM. 73 

But the most striking illustrations of this trait, 
which Germans suspected in Frederic, are given 
in Gustav Freytag's interesting book, " The Crown 
Prince and the Imperial Crown." It may be said 
in passing that even among Conservatives in 
Berlin there is a feeling that Freytag should not 
have published this book. No doubt it tells the 
truth, but then Freytag owed very much to the 
tender friendship and liking of Frederic, who 
conspicuously favoured him above other German 
writers, and wrote kindly things about him in his 
diary — and, if the truth had to be told, some other 
than Freytag should have told it. Coupled as 
it is in the public mind with Dr. Friedberg's 
desertion, heretofore spoken of, this behaviour of 
another of the dead Prince's friends is felt to help 
justify the low opinion of German gratitude held 
among scoffing neighbours. As a Berlin official 
said in comment to the writer : " When men like 
Friedberg and Freytag do these things to the 
memory of their dead patron, it is no wonder that 
foreigners call us Prussians a pack of wolves, 
ready always to leap upon and devour any com- 
rade who is down." 

Freytag was the foremost correspondent attached 
to Frederic's headquarters in 1870-71, and enjoyed 
the confidence of the Crown Prince in extraordi- 
nary measure. Thus he is able to give us a 
detailed picture of the man's moods and mental 



74 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

workings, day by day, during that eventful time. 
And this picture is a perfect panorama of varying 
phases of histrionism. 

The Crown Prince was sedulously cultivating 
the popular impression of himself as a plain, hail- 
fellow-well-met, friendly Prince. But Freytag 
says : ** The traditional conception of rank and 
position dwelt ineradicably in his soul ; when he 
had occasion to remember his own claims, he 
stood more vehemently on his dignity than others 
of his class. . . . Had destiny allowed him a real 
reign, this peculiarity would probably have shown 
itself in a manner unpleasantly surprising to his 
contemporaries." ^ 

More important still is this remark on the 
following page : " The idea of the German Empire 
grew out of princely pride in his soul ; it became 
an ardent wish, and I think he was the originator 
and motive power of this innovation." 

The fact that it was Frederic who conceived the 
idea of the Empire first came to the world when 
Dr. Geffcken printed that famous portion of the 
Crown Prince's diary which led to prosecutions 
and infinite scandal. Freytag's subsequent publi- 
cation surrounds the fact with most curious minu- 
tiae of detail. 

As early as August ist, before his Third Army 

^ " The Crown Prince and the German Imperial Crown," 
by Gustav Freytag, p. 27. 



THE TIDINGS OF FREDERICS DOOM. 75 

had even crossed the Rhine, Frederic had broached 
the idea of an empire, with Prussia at its head. 
All through the campaign which followed his head 
was full of it. He busied his mind with questions 
of titles, precedence, &c., to grow out of the new 
creation. One afternoon — August nth — he strolled 
on the hillside with Freytag for a talk. ** He had 
put on his general's cloak so that it fell around his 
tall figure like a king's mantle, and had thrown 
around his neck the gold chain of the Hohenzol- 
lern order, which he was not wont to wear in the 
quiet of the camp — and paced elated along the 
village green. Filled with the importance which 
the emperor idea had for him, he evidently adapted 
his external appearance to the conversation." 
During this talk he asked what the new title of 
the King of Prussia should be, and the anti-im- 
perialist Freytag suggested Duke of Germany. 
Then " the Crown Prince broke out with emphasis, 
his eyes flashing : ' No ! he must be Emperor! ' " ^ 
To create this empire Frederic was quite ready 
to forcibly coerce the Southern German States. 
Bismarck and William I., whom we think of as 
rough, hard, arbitrary men, shrank from even 
considering such a course. To the enthusiastic 
and slightly unreal Frederic it seemed the most 
natural thing in the world. The account in his 
diary of the long interview of Nov. 16, 1870, with 
* Freytag, p. 20. 



76 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

Bismarck makes all this curiously clear. " What 
about the South Germans ? Would you threaten 
them, then ? " asks the Chancellor. " Yes, in- 
deed ! " answers our ideal constitutional Frederic, 
with a light heart. The interview was protracted 
and stormy, Bismarck ending it by resort to his 
accustomed trick of threatening to resign, a well- 
worn device which twenty years later was to be 
used just once too often. 

In this same diary, under date of the following 
March (1871), Frederic writes : '' I doubt whether 
the necessary uprightness exists for the free de- 
velopment of the Empire, and think that only a 
new epoch, which shall one day come to terms 
with me, will see that. . . . More especially I 
shall be the first Prince who has to appear before 
his people after having honourably declared for 
constitutional methods without any reserve." 

One feels that these two passages from his own 
diary — the utterances of November and the reflec- 
tions of March — show distinctly why the practical 
rulers, soldiers, and statesmen of Prussia distrusted 
Frederic. They saw him more eager and strenuous 
about grasping the imperial dignity than any one 
else — willing even to break treaties and force 
Bavaria, Saxony, and Wlirtemberg into the empire 
at the cannon's mouth, and then they heard him 
lamenting that until he came to the throne there 
would not be enough ** uprightness to insure 




The Empress Frederic. 

iFroJn a /'hotogrnph by Elliott & Fry, 55 Baker Street, London^ IK) 



THE TIDINGS OF FREDERICS DOOM, 79 

"constitutional methods." Candidly, it is impos- 
sible to wonder at their failure to reconcile the 
two. 

An even more acute reason for this suspicion 
and dislike lay in Frederic's relations with the 
English Court. To begin with, there was a sen- 
sational and fantastic uxoriousness about his atti- 
tude toward his wife which could not command 
sympathy in Germany. Freytag tells of his lying 
on his camp bed watching the photographs of his 
wife and children on the table before him, with 
tears in his eyes, and rhapsodizing about his wife's 
qualities of heart and intellect to the newspaper 
correspondent, until Freytag promised to dedicate 
his next book to her. ** He gave me a look of 
assent and lay back satisfied." This in itself 
would rather pall on the German taste. 

Worse still, Frederic used to write long letters 
home to his wife every day — often the work of 
striking the camp would be delayed until these 
epistles could be finished — and then the Crown 
Princess at Berlin would as regularly send the pur- 
port of these to her royal relatives in England and 
thence it would be telegraphed to France. Bis- 
marck always believed, or professed to believe, 
that there was concerted treachery in this business. 
No one else is likely to credit this assumption. 
But at all events the fact is that this embarrassing 
diffusion of news was discovered and complained 



8o THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

of at the time, and charged against Frederic, and 
was the reason, as Bismarck bluntly declared 
during the discussion over the diary, why the 
Crown Prince was not trusted by his father or 
allowed to share state secrets. 

As for the Empire itself, though the original 
idea of it was his, Frederic suffered the fate of 
many other inventors in having very little to do 
with it after it was put into working order. He 
presented a magnificently heroic figure on horse- 
back in out-of-door spectacles, and his cultured 
tastes made the task of presiding over museums 
and learned societies congenial. But there his 
participation in public affairs ended. 

The Empire he had dreamed of was of a wholly 
different sort from this prosaic, machine-like, de- 
partmental structure which Bismarck and Delbrlick 
made. Frederic's vision had been of some splen- 
did, picturesque, richly-decorated revival of the 
Holy Roman Empire. There are a number of 
delightful pages in Freytag's book giving the 
Crown Prince's romantic views on this point. ^ 
When the first Reichstag met in 1871, to acclaim 
the new Emperor in his own capital, Frederic 
introduced into the ceremony the ancient throne 
chair of the Saxon Emperors, which may now be 
seen in Kerry's palace at Goslar, and which, 
having lain unknown for centuries in a Harz 
"Fryetag, pp. 1 15-130. 



THE TIDINGS OF FREDERICS DOOM, 8i 

village, was discovered by being offered for sale by 
a peasant as old metal some seventy years ago. 

Among practical Germans this attempt to link 
their new Empire with the discredited and dis- 
reputable old fabric, which had been too rotten for 
even the Hapsburgs to hold together, was ex- 
tremely distasteful. Yet Frederic clung to this 
pseudo-mediaevalism to the last. When he came 
to the throne as Kaiser his first proclamation 
spoke of '* the re-established Empire.", And those 
who were in Berlin at the time know how a whole 
day's delay was caused by the dissension over 
what title the new ruler should assume — the secret 
of which was that he desired to call himself Kaiser 
Friedrich IV, thus going back for imperial con- 
tinuity to that Friedrich III who died while 
Martin Luther was a boy, and who is remembered 
only because he was the father of the great Max 
and was the original possessor of the Austrian 
under lip. 

Freytag indeed says that to that first proclama- 
tion Frederic did affix a signature with an IV — 
the assumption being that Bismarck altered it. 

The reader has been shown this less satisfying 
aspect of Frederic, as his associates saw him, 
because without understanding it the attitude of 
both his father and his son towards him would be 
flatly unintelligible. They did not believe that he 
would make a safe Emperor for Germany. 



82 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

The old William all the same loved his son 
deeply, and manifested an almost extravagant 
delight at the creditable way in which he carried 
himself through the Bohemian and French cam- 
paigns. In the succeeding years of peace it is 
obvious enough that the venerable Kaiser grew 
despondent about his son's association with 
Radicals and their dreams — and it is equally clear 
that there were plenty of advisers at hand to con- 
firm the old man in these gloomy doubts. Hence, 
though he cherished a sincere affection for ** Unser 
Fritz" and his English wife, and would gladly 
have had them much about him, he could not help 
being of the party opposed to them — the party 
which lost no opportunity of exalting young 
William in his grandfather's eyes as the real hope 
of the Hohenzollerns. Thus there was a growing, 
though tacit, estrangement between the father and 
son. 

When Frederic was stricken with disease, how- 
ever, the kindly old father suffered keenly. There 
was great sweetness of nature in the tough martial 
frame of William I, and there is an abiding 
pathos in the picture we have of his last moments 
— the stout nonogenarian who fought death so 
valiantly even to his last breath that it seemed as 
if he could not die, rolling his white head on the 
pillow, and moaning piteously, "Poor Fritz ! Poor 
Frit^ 1 " with his rambling thoughts beyond the 



THE TIDINGS OF FREDERICS DOOM, 83 

snow-clad Alps, where his son was also in the 
destroyer's grasp. 

As for young William, his estrangement from 
his father, if less noted, had been more complete. 
He belonged openly to another party, and more- 
over smarted under the reproach of being unfilial, 
which the friends of his parents, largely of the 
writing and printing class, publicly levelled at him. 

Placed in this position, the shock of the news 
that his father had an incurable disease must have 
come upon him with peculiar force. We can only 
dimly imagine to ourselves the great struggles 
fought out in his breast between grief for the 
father, who had really been an ideal parent, loving, 
gentle, solicitous, and tenderly proud, and concern 
for the Empire, which might be doomed to have a 
wasting invalid at its head for years. On the one 
side was the repellent thought that this father's 
death would mean his own swift advancement, 
for the grandfather could clearly live but little 
longer. On the other side, if his father's life was 
prolonged, it meant the elevation to the throne of 
a sick man, whose fitness for the crown of this 
armed and beleaguered nation would at all times 
have been doubtful, and who, in his enfeebled 
state, at the mercy of the radical agitators and 
adventurers about him, might jeopardize the 
fortunes of Empire and dynasty alike. 

Torn between these conflicting views, it is not 



84 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

strange that William welcomed a middle course, 
suggested, I am authoritatively informed, by 
Frederic himself. 

The Crown Prince returned to Berlin from Ems 
thoroughly frightened. He had no doubt what- 
ever that he was suffering from cancer and 
expected to die within the year. Like all men of 
an expansive and impressionable temperament, he 
was subject to fits of profound melancholia — as 
Freytag puts it, "fond of indulging in gloomy 
thoughts and pessimistic humours ; " so much so 
that he ** sometimes cherished the idea of 
renouncing the throne, in case of its being vacant, 
and leaving the government to his son." ^ He 
had grown lethargic and dispirited through years 
of inaction and systematic exclusion from govern- 
mental labours and interests. He returned from 
Ems now, in this April of 1887, in a state of 
complete depression. 

The evident affection and sympathy with which 
both his father and son received him, gave an 
added impulse to the despairing ideas which had 
conquered his mind since his sentence of death by 
cancer had been uttered. 

In the course of a touching interview between the 

three Hohenzollerns, Frederic with tears in his 

eyes declared that he did not desire to reign, and 

that if by chance he survived his father he would 

' Freytag, p. 78. 



THE TIDINGS OF FREDERICS DOOM. 85 

waive his rights of succession in favour of his elder 
son. This declaration was within a brief space of 
time repeated in the presence of Prince Bismarck, 
and was by him reduced to writing. The paper 
was deposited among the official private archives 
of the Crown at Berlin, and presumably is still in 
existence there. 



CHAPTER V. 

THROUGH THE SHADOWS TO THE THRONE. 

The fact that the Crown Prince Frederic, despon- 
dent and unnerved in the presence of a mortal 
disease, had voluntarily pledged himself to 
renounce his rights of succession, was naturally 
not published to the world. Although it is beyond 
doubt that such a pledge was given, nothing more 
definite than a roundabout hint has to this day 
been printed in Germany upon the subject. There 
are no means of ascertaining the exact number of 
personages in high position to whom this intelli- 
gence was imparted at the time. As has been 
said, the Emperor, the Chancellor, and the young 
heir were parties to Frederic's original action. 
Certain indications exist that for a time the secret 
was kept locked in the breasts of these four men. 
Then Frederic confessed to his wife what he had 
done. 



88 277^ YOUNG EMPEROR, 

The strangest feature of this whole curious 
business is that Frederic should ever have taken 
this gravely important step, not only without his 
wife's knowledge, but against all her interests. 
Her influence over him was of such commanding 
completeness, and his devotion to her so dominated 
his whole career and character, that the thing can 
only be explained by laying stress upon his 
admitted tendency to melancholia and assuming 
that his shaken nerves collapsed under the 
emotional strain of meeting his father and son 
with sympathetic tears in their eyes. 

With the moment when the wife first learned of 
this abdication the active drama begins. She did 
not for an instant dream of suffering the arrange- 
ment to be carried out — at least until every 
conceivable form of resistance had been exhausted. 
We can fancy this proud, energetic princess cast- 
ing about anxiously here, there, everywhere, for 
means with which to fight the grimly-powerful 
combination against her husband's future and her 
own, and can well believe that in the darkest hour 
of the struggle which ensued this true daughter of 
the Fighting Guelphs never lost heart. 

For friends it was hopeless to look anywhere in 
Germany. She had lived in Berlin and Potsdam 
for nearly thirty years, devoting her large talents 
and wide sympathies to the encouragement of 
literature, science, and the arts, to the inculcation 



THROUGH THE SHADOWS. 89 

of softening and merciful thoughts embodied in 
new hospitals, asylums, and charitable institutions, 
and the formation of orders of nurses ; most 
earnestly of all, to the task of lifting the women of 
Germany up in the domestic and social scale, and 
making of them something higher than mere 
mothers of families and household drudges. 
Nobody thanked her for her pains, least of all the 
women she had striven to befriend. Her undoubted 
want of tact and reserve in commenting upon the 
foibles of her adopted countrymen kept her an 
alien in the German mind, in spite of everything 
she did to foster a kindlier attitude. The feelings 
of the country at large were passively hostile to 
her. The influential classes hated her vehemently. 

That she should link together in her mind this 
widespread and assiduously-cultivated enmity to 
her, and this new and alarming conspiracy to keep 
her husband from the throne, was most natural. 
She leaped to the conclusion that it was all a plot, 
planned by her ancient and implacable foe, 
Bismarck. That her own son was in it made the 
thing more acutely painful, but only increased her 
determination to fight. 

Instinctively she turned to her English home 
for help. Although nearly two centuries have 
passed since George I entered upon his English 
inheritance, and more than half a century has 
gone by since the last signs of British dominion 



90 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

were removed from Hanover, the dynastic family 
politics of Windsor and Balmoral remain almost 
exclusively German. In all the confused and em- 
bittered squabbles which have kept the royal and 
princely houses of Germany by the ears since the 
close of the Napoleonic wars, the interference of 
the British Guelph has been steadily pitted against 
the influence of the Prussian Hohenzollern. 
Hardly one of the changes which, taken altogether, 
have whittled the reigning families of Germany 
from thirty down to a shadowy score since 1820, 
has been made without the active meddling of 
English royalty on one side or the other — most 
generally on the losing side. Hence, while it was 
natural that the Crown Princess should remember 
in her time of sore trial that she was also Princess 
Royal in England, it was equally to be expected 
that Germany should prepare itself to resent this 
fresh case of British intermeddling. 

The scheme of battle which the Crown Princess, 
in counsel with her insular relatives, decided upon 
was at once ingenious and bold. It could not, 
unfortunately, be gainsaid that her husband, 
Frederic, had formally pledged himself to relinquish 
the crown if he proved to be afflicted with a mortal 
disease. Very well ; the war must be waged upon 
that *' if." 

A good many momentous letters had crossed 
the North Sea, heavily sealed and borne by trusted 



THROUGH THE SHADOWS. 91 

messengers, before the system of defence was 
disclosed by the first overt movement. On the 
20th of May, 1887, Dr. Morell Mackenzie, the 
best known of London specialists in throat diseases, 
arrived in Berlin, and was immediately introduced 
to a conference of German physicians, heretofore 
in charge of the case, as a colleague who was to 
take henceforth the leading part. They told him 
that to the best of their belief they had to deal 
with a cancer, but were awaiting his diagnosis. 
On the following day, and a fortnight later, he per- 
formed operations upon the illustrious patient's 
throat to serve as the basis for a microscopical ex- 
amination. With his forceps he drew out bits of 
flesh, which were sent to Prof. Virchow for scien- 
tific scrutiny. Upon examining these Prof. Vir- 
chow reported he discovered nothing to " excite 
the suspicion of wider and graver disease," ^ thus 
giving the most powerful support imaginable to Dr. 
Mackenzie's diagnosis of " a benign growth." 

The German physicians allege that Dr. 
Mackenzie drew out pieces of the comparatively 
healthful right vocal cord. The London specialist 
denies this. Nothing could be further from the 
purpose of this work than to take sides upon any 
phase of the unhappy and undignified controversy 
which ensued. It is enough here to note the 
charge, as indicating the view which Prof. Gerhardt 
» Mackenzie's *' Frederic the Noble," p. 34. 



92 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

and his German colleagues took from the first of 
Mackenzie's mission in Berlin. 

This double declaration against the theory of 
cancer having been obtained, the next step was to 
secure the removal of Frederic. The celebration 
of the Queen's jubilee afforded a most valuable 
occasion. He came to England on June 14th — and 
he never again stepped foot in Berlin until he 
returned as Kaiser the following year. Nearly 
three months were spent at Norwood, and in 
Scotland and the Isle of Wight. A brief stop in 
the Austrian Tyrol followed, and then the Crown 
Prince settled in his winter home at San Remo. 
On the day of his arrival there Mackenzie was 
telegraphed for, as very dangerous symptoms had 
presented themselves. He reached San Remo on 
November 5, 1887, and discovered so grave a 
situation that Prince William was immediately 
summoned from Berlin. 

That the young Prince had been placed in a 
most trying position by the quarrel which now 
raged about his father's sick-room, need not be 
pointed out. The physicians who stood highest 
in Berlin, and who were backed by the liking 
and confidence of William's friends, were deeply 
indignant at having been superseded by two 
Englishmen like Mackenzie and Hovell. This 
national prejudice became easily confounded with 
partisan antagonisms. The Germans are not 



THROUGH THE SHADOWS, 93 

celebrated for calm, or for skill in conducting con- 
troversies with delicacy, and in this instance the 
worst side of everybody concerned was exhibited. 

One recalls now with astonishment the bound- 
less rancour and recklessness of accusation which 
characterized that bitter wrangle. Many good 
people of one party seriously believed that the 
German physicians wanted to gain access to 
Frederic in order to kill him. On the other 
hand, a great number insisted that Mackenzie 
was deceiving the public, and had subjected 
Frederic to the most terrible maimings and 
tortures in order to conceal from Germany the 
fact of the cancer. The basest motives were 
ascribed by either side to the other. The Court 
circle asked what they were doing, then, to the 
Crown Prince that they hid him away in Italy ; 
the answering insinuation was that very good 
reasons existed for not allowing him to fall into 
the hands of the Berlin doctors, who were so 
openly devoted to his heir. 

In a state of public mind where hints of 
assassination grow familiar to the ear, the mere 
charge of a lack of filial affection sounds very 
tame indeed. 

That William deserved during this painful 
period the reproaches heaped upon him by the 
whole English-speaking world is by no means 
clear. Such fault as may be with fairness 



94 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

imputed to him, seems to have grown quite 
naturally out of the circumstances. He was on 
the side of the German physicians as against 
Mackenzie ; but after all that has happened that 
can scarcely be regarded as a crime. He could 
not but range himself with those who resented 
the tone Dr. Mackenzie and his friends assumed 
toward what they called ^* the Court circles of 
Berlin." 

When he reached San Remo in November, it 
was to note the death mark clearly stamped on 
his father's face ; yet he heard the English 
entourage still talking about the possibility of the 
disease not being cancer. The German doctors 
had grievous stories to tell him about how they 
had been crowded out and put under the heel of 
the foreigner. Whether he would or not, he was 
made a party to the whole wretched wrangle 
which henceforth vexed the atmosphere of the 
Villa Zirio. 

The outside world was subjecting this villa and 
its inhabitants to the most tirelessly inquisitive 
scrutiny. Newspaper correspondents engirdled 
San Remo with a cordon of espionage, through 
which filtered the gossip of servants and the stray 
babbling of tradespeople. Dr. Mackenzie — now 
become Sir Morell — confided his views of the case 
to journalists who desired them. The German 
physicians furtively promulgated stories of ^uitQ 



THROUGH THE SHADOWS. 95 

a different hue, through the medium of the 
German press. Thus it came about that, while 
Germany as a whole disliked deeply the manner 
in which Frederic's case was managed, the 
English-speaking peoples espoused the opposite 
view and condemned as cruel and unnatural the 
position occupied by the Germans, with young 
William at their head. 

As the winter of 1887-8 went forward, it became 
apparent that the Kaiser's prolonged life had run 
its span. The question which would die first, 
old William or middle-aged Frederic, hung in a 
fluttering balance. Germany watched the un- 
certain development of this dual tragedy with 
bated breath, and all Christendom bent its atten- 
tion upon Germany and her two dying Hohen- 
zoUerns. 

March came, with its black skies and drifting 
snow wreaths and bitter winds blown a thousand 
miles across the Sclavonic sand plains, and laid 
the aged Kaiser upon his deathbed. Prince 
William, having alternated through the winter 
between Berlin and San Remo, was at the last in 
attendance upon his grandfather. The dying old 
man spoke to him as if he were the immediate 
heir. Upon him all the injunctions of state and 
family policy which the departing monarch wished 
to utter were directly laid. The story of those 
conferences will doubtless never be revealed in its 



96 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

entirety. But it is known that, if any notion had 
up to that time existed of keeping Frederic from 
the throne, it was now abandoned. William was 
counselled to loving patience and submission 
during the little reign which his father at best 
could have. Bismarck was pledged to remain 
in office upon any and all terms short of peremp- 
tory dismissal through this same brief period. 

It was to William, too, that that last exhorta- 
tion to be ** considerate " with Russia was 
muttered by the dying man — that strange 
domestic legacy of the Hohenzollerns which 
hints at the murder of Charles XII, recalls 
the partition of Poland, the despair of Jena, and 
the triumph of Waterloo, and has yet in store 
we know not what still stranger things. 

William I died on March 9, 1888. On the 
morning of the following day Frederic and his 
wife and daughters left San Remo in a special 
train and arrived at Berlin on the night of the 
nth, having made the swiftest long journey 
known in the records of continental railways. 
The new Kaiser's proclamation — "To my People" 
— bears the date of March 12th, but it was really 
not issued until the next day. 

During that period of delay, the Schloss at 
Charlottenburg, which had been hastily fitted up 
for the reception of the invalid, was the scene of 
protracted conferences between Frederic, his son 



THROUGH THE SHADOWS. 97 

William, and Bismarck. Hints are not lacking 
that these interviews had their stormy and un- 
pleasant side, for Frederic had up to this time 
fairly maintained his general health, and could to 
a limited extent make use of his voice. But all 
that is visible to us of this is the fact that some 
sort of understanding w^as arrived at, by w^hich 
Bismarck could remain in office and accept 
responsibility for the acts of the reign. 

The story of those melancholy ninety-nine days 
need not detain us long. Young William himself, 
though standing now in the strong light of public 
scrutiny, on the steps of the throne, remained 
silent, and for the most part motionless. The 
world gossiped busily about his heartless conduct 
toward his mother, his callous behaviour in the 
presence of his father's terrible affliction, his 
sympathy with those who most fiercely abused 
the good Sir Morell Mackenzie. As there had 
been tales of his unfilial actions at San Remo, so 
now there were stories of his shameless haste to 
snatch the reins of power from his father's hands. 
So late as August, 1889, an anonymous writer 
alleged in The New Review that *' the watchers by 
the sick bed in Charlottenburg were always in 
dread when ' Willie ' visited his father lest he 
might brusquely demand the establishment of a 
Regency." 

Next to no proof of these assertions can be 



98 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

discovered in Berlin. If there was talk of a 
Regency — as well there might be among those 
who knew of the existence of Frederic's offer to 
abdicate — it did not in any way come before the 
public. I know of no one qualified to speak who 
says that it ever came before even Frederic. 

That a feeling of bitterness existed between 
William and his parents is not to be denied. All 
the events of the past year had contributed to 
intensify this feeling and to put them wider and 
wider apart. Even if the young man had been 
able to divest himself of the last emotion of self- 
sensitiveness, there would still have remained the 
dislike for the whole England-Mackenzie-San 
Remo episode which rankled in every conservative 
German mind. But neither the blood nor the 
training of princes helps them to put thoughts of 
self aside — and in William's case a long chain of 
circumstances bound him to a position which, 
though we may find it extremely unpleasant to the 
eye, seemed to him a simple matter of duty and 
of justice to himself and to Prussia. 

The world gladly preserves and cherishes an 
idealized picture of the knightly Kaiser Frederic, 
facing certain death with intrepid calm, and 
labouring devotedly to turn what fleeting days 
might be left him to the advantage of liberalism 
in Germany. It is a beautiful and elevating pic- 
ture, and we are all of us the richer for its possession. 



THROUGH THE SHADOWS. 99 

But, in truth, Frederic practically accomplished 
but one reform during his reign, and that came in 
the very last week of his life and was bought at a 
heavy price. To the end he gave a surprisingly 
regular attention to the tasks of a ruler. Both at 
Charlottenburg and, later, at Potsdam, he forced 
himself, dying though he was, to daily devote two 
hours or more to audiences with ministers and 
officials, and an even greater space of time in his 
library to signing State papers and writing up his 
diary. But this labour was almost wholly upon 
routine matters. 

Two incidents of the brief reign are remembered 
— the frustrated attempt to marry one of the 
Prussian Princesses to a Battenberg and the 
successful expulsion of Puttkamer from the 
Prussian Ministry of the Interior. 

The Battenberg episode attracted much the 
greater share of public attention at the time, not 
only from the element of romance inherent in the 
subject, but because it seemed to be an obvious 
continuation of the Anglo-German feud which had 
been flashing its lightnings about Frederic's 
devoted head for a twelvemonth. Of the four 
Battenberg Princes — cousins of the Grand Duke 
of Hesse by a morganatic marriage, and hence, 
according to Prussian notions, not ** born " at all 
— one had married a daughter, another a grand- 
daughter of the Queen of England. This seemed 

7 



loo THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

to the German aristocracy a most remarkable 
thing, and excited a good deal of class feeling, but 
was not important so long as these upstart 
proteges of English eccentricity kept out of reach 
of German snubs. 

A third Battenberg, Alexander, had made for 
himself a considerable name as Prince of Bulgaria : 
in fact, had done so well that the Germans felt 
like liking him in spite of his brothers. The way 
in which he had completely thrashed the Servians, 
moreover, reflected credit upon the training he had 
had in the German Army. In his sensational 
quarrel with the Czar, too, German opinion leaned 
to his side, and altogether there was a kindly 
feeling toward him. Perhaps if there had been 
no antecedent quarrel about English interference, 
even his matrimonial adoption into the Hohen- 
zollern family might have been tolerated with 
good grace. 

As it was, the announcement at the end of 
March that he was to be betrothed to the Princess 
Victoria, the second daughter of Frederic, pro- 
voked on the instant a furious uproar. The 
Junker class all over Germany protested indig- 
nantly. The " reptile " press promptly raised the 
cry that this was more of the alien work of the 
English Empress, who had been prompted by her 
English mother to put this fresh affront upon all 
true Germans. Prince Bismarck himself hastened 



THROUGH THE SHADOWS, 



loi 



to Berlin and sternly insisted upon the abandon- 
ment of the obnoxious idea. There was a fierce 
struggle before a result was reached, with hot 
feminine words and tears of rage on one side, 
with square-jawed, gruff-voiced obstinacy and 
much plain talk on the other. At last Bismarck 
overbore opposition and had his way. Prince 
William manifested almost effusive gratitude to 
the Chancellor for having dispelled this nightmare 
of a Battenberg brother-in-law. 

The solicitude about this project seems to have 
been largely maternal. Sir Morell Mackenzie 
says of the popular excitement over the subject : 
'' I cannot say that it produced much effect on the 
Emperor." As for the Princess Victoria, she has 
now for some time been the wife of Prince Adolph 
of Schaumburg-Lippe. 

^ Although it did not attract a tithe of the atten- 
tion given the Battenberg marriage sensation, the 
dismissal of Puttkamer was really an important 
act, the effects of which were lasting in Germany. 
This official had been Minister of the Interior 
since 1881— a thoroughgoing Bismarckian admini- 
strator, whose use of the great machinery of his 
office to coerce voters, intimidate opposition, and 
generally grease the wheels of despotic government, 
had become the terror and despair of Prussian 
Liberalism. To have thrown him out of office it 
was worth while to reign only ninety-nine days. 



I02 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

Ostensibly his retirement was a condition imposed 
by Frederic before he would sign the Reichstag's 
bill lengthening the Parliamentary term to five 
years. The Radicals had hoped he would veto it, 
and the overthrow of Puttkamer was offered as a 
solace to these wounded hopes. But in reality 
Puttkamer had been doomed from the outset of 
the new reign. He was conspicuous among those 
who spoke with contempt of Frederic, and in his 
ministerial announcement of the old Kaiser's death 
to the public, insolently neglected to say a word 
about his successor. Questioned about this later, 
he had the impertinence to say that he could not 
find out what title the new Kaiser would choose 
to assume. 

Puttkamer's resignation was gazetted on June 
nth, and that very evening Prince Bismarck gave 
a great dinner, at which the fallen Minister was the 
guest of honour. In one sense the insult was wasted, 
for out at Potsdam the invalid at whom it was 
levelled could no longer eat, and was obviously 
close to death. Indirectly, however, the affront 
made a mark upon the world's memory. We shall 
hear of Puttkamer again. 

On the 1st day of June Frederic had been con- 
veyed by boat to Potsdam, where he wished to 
spend his remaining weeks in the most familiar of 
his former homes, the New Palace, the name of 
which he changed to Friedrichskron. He was 



THROUGH THE SHADOWS. 103 

already a djnng man. Two clever observers, who 
v^ere on the little pier at Gleinicke, described to 
me the appearance of the Emperor when he was 
carried up out of the cabin to land. Said one : 
" He was crouched down, wretched, scared, and 
pallid, like a man going to execution." The other 
added : " Say rather like an enfeebled maniac in 
charge of his keepers." 

Yet, broken and crushed as he was, he was 
Kaiser to the last. The announcement of Putt- 
kamer's downfall came on June nth. Frederic 
died on June 15th. 

It was in the late forenoon of that rainy, gray 
summer day that the black and white royal 
standard above the palace fell — signifying that the 
eighth King of Prussia was no more. A moment 
later orderlies were running hither and thither 
outside ; the troops within the palace park hastily 
threw themselves into line, and detachments were 
at once marched to each of the gates to draw a 
cordon between Friedrichskron and all the world 
besides. 

In an inner room in the great palace the elder 
son of the dead Kaiser, all at once become William 
II, German Emperor, King in Prussia, eighteen 
times a Duke, twice a Grand Duke, ten times a 
Count, fifteen times a Seigneur, and three times a 
Margrave — this young man, with fifty-four titles 



I04 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

thus suddenly plumped down upon him,' seated 
himself to write proclamations to his Army and his 

Navy. 

^ With the possible exception of the Emperor of Austria, 
William is the most betitled man in Europe. Beside being 
German Emperor and King of Prussia, he is Margrave of 
Brandenburg, and the two Lausitzes ; Grand Duke of Lower 
Rhineland and Posen ; Duke of Silesia, Glatz, Saxony, 
Westphalia, Engern, Pomerania, Luneburg, Holstein- 
Schleswig, Magdeburg, Bremen, Geldern, Cleve, Juliers and 
Berg, Crossen, Lauenburg, Mecklenburg, of the Wends and 
of the Cassubes ; Landgrave of Hesse and Thuringia ; 
Prince of Orange ; Count-Prince of Henneburg ; Count of 
the Mark, of Ravensberg, of Hohenstein, of Lingen and 
Tecklenburg, of Mansfeld, Sigmaringen, Veringen, and of 
Hohenzollern ; Burgrave of Nuremberg ; Seigneur of Frank- 
furt, Riigen, East Friesland, Paderborn, Pyrmont, Halber- 
stadt, Miinster, Minden, Osnabruck, Hildesheim, Verden, 
Kammin, Fulda, Nassau and Moers. 



CHAPTER VI. 

UNDER THE SWAY OF THE BISMARCKS. 

During the three days between the death and 
burial of Frederic the world saw and heard nothing 
of his successor save these two proclamations to 
the Army and Navy. This in itself was suffi- 
ciently strange. It was like a slap in the face of 
nineteenth-century civilization that this young 
man, upon whom the vast task of ruling an em- 
pire rich in historical memories of peaceful pro- 
gress had devolved, should take such a barbaric 
view of his position. In this country which gave 
birth to the art of printing, this Germany wherein 
Durer and Cranach worked and Luther changed 
the moral history of mankind and Lessing cleared 
the way for that noble band of poets of whom 
Goethe stands first and Wagner is not last, it 
seemed nothing less than monstrous that a youth 
called to be Emperor should see only columns of 
troops and iron-clads. 



io6 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

The purport of these proclamations, shot forth 
from the printing press while the news of Frede- 
ric's death was still in the air, fitted well the pre- 
cipitancy of their appearance. William delivered 
a long eulogy upon his grandfather, made only a 
passing allusion to his father, recited the warlike 
achievements and character of his remoter ances- 
tors, and closed by saying : ** Thus we belong to 
each other, I and the army ; thus we were born 
for one another ; and firmly and inseparably will 
we hold together, whether it is God's will to give 
us peace or storm." 

Exultant militarism rang out from every line of 
these utterances. The world listened to this 
young man boasting about being a war lord, with 
feelings nicely graded upon a scale of distances. 
Those near by put hands on sword hilts; those 
further away laughed contemptuously ; but all 
alike, far and near, felt that an evil day for Ger- 
many had dawned. 

The funeral of old William at Berlin in March 
had been a spectacle memorable in the history of 
mankind — the climacteric demonstration of the 
pomp and circumstance of European monarchical 
systems. A simple military funeral, a trifle more 
ornate than that of a General of division, was 
given to his successor. The day, June i8th, was 
the anniversary of Waterloo. 

It may have been due to thoughts upon what 



UNDER THE SWAY OF THE BISMARCKS. 107 

this day meant in Prussian history ; more prob- 
ably it reflected the chastened and softening influ- 
ences of these three days' meditation in the palace 
of death ; from whatever cause, William's address 
to the Prussian people, issued on the i8th, was a 
much more satisfactory performance. The tone 
of the drill sergeant was entirely lacking, and the 
words about his father, the departed Frederic, 
were full of filial sweetness. The closing para- 
graph fairly mirrors the whole proclamation : 

** I have vowed to God that, after the example 
of my fathers, I will be a just and clement Prince 
to my people, that I will foster piety and the fear 
of God, and that I will protect the peace, promote 
the welfare of the country, be a helper of the poor 
and distressed, and a true guardian of the right." 

Pondering upon the marked difference between 
this address and the excited and vain-glorious 
harangue to the fighting men of Germany which 
heralded William's accession, it occurred to me to 
inquire whether or not Dr. Hinzpeter had in the 
interim made his appearance at Potsdam. No 
one could remember, but the point may be worth 
the attention of the future historian. 

Studying all that has since happened in the 
variant lights of these proclamations of June 15th 
and June i8th, one sees a constant struggle between 
two Williams — between the gentle, dreamy-eyed, 
soft-faced boy of Cassel, and the vain, arrogant 



io8 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

youth who learned to clank a sword at his heels 
and twist a baby moustache in Bonn. Such con- 
flicts and clashings between two hostile inner 
selves have a part in the personal history of each 
of us. Only we are not out under the searching 
glare of illumination which beats upon a prince, 
and the records and results of these internal 
warrings are of interest to ourselves alone. 

William, moreover, has one of those nervous, 
delicately-poised, highly-sensitized temperaments 
which responds readily and without reserve to the 
emotion of the moment. Increasing years seem 
to be strengthening his judgment, but they do not 
advance him out of the impressionable age. In 
the romantic idealism and mysticism of his mind, 
and in the histrionic bent of his impulses, he is a 
true son of his father, a genuine heir of the strange 
fantastic Ascanien strain, which meant greatness 
in Catharine II, madness in her son Paul, and 
whimsical staginess in his grand-daughter Augusta. 

Like his father, too, his nature is peculiarly 
susceptible to the domination of a stronger and 
more deeply rooted personality. The wide differ- 
ence between them arises from this very similitude. 
Frederic spent all his adult life under the influence 
of the broad-minded, cultured, and high-thinking 
English Princess, his wife. William, during these 
years now under notice, was in the grip of the 
Bismarcks, 



UNDER THE SWAY OF THE BISMARCKS. 109 

The ascendency of this family, which attained 
its zenith in these first months of the young 
Kaiser's reign, is a unique thing in the history of 
Prussia. The Hohenzollerns have been heredi- 
tarily a stiff-backed race, much addicted to per- 
sonal government, and not at all given to leaning 
on other people. From 1660 to i860 you will 
search their records in vain for the name of a 
minister who was allowed to usurp functions not 
strictly his own. The first Frederic William was 
a good deal pulled about and managed by inferiors, 
it is true, but they did it only by making them- 
selves seem more his inferiors than any others 
about him. No Wolsey or Richelieu or Metter- 
nich could thrive in the keen air of the Mark of 
Brandenburg, under the old kingly traditions of 
Prussia. 

Bismarck rose upon the ruins of those tradi- 
tions. In 1862 the Prussian Diet and Prussian 
society generally were in open revolt against the 
new king, William I. Constitutionalism and the 
spread of modern ideas had made the old abso- 
lutist system of the Hohenzollerns impossible ; 
budgets were thrown out, constituencies were 
abetted in their mutiny by the nobles, and the 
newspaper press was fiercely hostile. The King, 
a frank, kindly, slow-minded old soldier, did not 
know what to do. The thought of surrendering 
his historic prerogatives under pressure, and the 



no THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

resource of sweeping Berlin's streets with grape- 
shot, were equally hateful to him. In his per- 
plexity he summoned his Ambassador at Paris to 
Berlin, and begged him to undertake the defence 
of the monarchy against its enemies. He made 
this statesman, Otto von Bismarck, Minister of 
the King's House and of Foreign Affairs, and 
avowedly a Premier who had undertaken to rule 
Prussia without a Parliament. 

It was the old story of the Saxons, being invited 
to defend the British homestead, and remaining 
to enjoy it themselves. 

The lapse of a quarter of a century found this 
King magnified into an Emperor, enjoying the 
peaceful semblance of a reign over 48,000,000 of 
people, where before he had stormily failed to 
govern much less than half that number. He had 
grown into the foremost place among European 
sovereigns so easily and without friction, and was 
withal so honest and amiable an old gentleman, that 
it did not disturb him to note how much greater a 
man than himself his Minister had come to be. 

The relations between William I and Bismarck 
were always frank, loyal, and extremely simple. 
They were fond of each other, mutually grateful 
for what each had helped the other to do and to 
be. It illumines one of the finest traits in the 
great Chancellor's character to realize that, during 
the last eighteen years of the old Kaiser's life, 



UNDER THE SWAY OF THE BISMARCKS. in 

Bismarck would never go to the opera or theatre 
for fear the popular reception given to him might 
wound the royal sensitiveness of his master. 

Bismarck, having all power in his own hands, 
became possessed of that most human of passions, 
the desire to found a dynasty, and hand this 
authority down to his posterity. There was a 
certain amount of promising material in his older 
son Herbert — a robust, rough-natured, fairly- 
acute, and altogether industrious man — ten years 
older than the Prince William, now become 
Kaiser. The strength of Prince Bismarck's hold 
upon the old William was only matched by the 
supremacy he had thus far managed to exert over 
the imperial grandson. He dreamed a vision of 
having Herbert as omnipotent in the Germany of 
the twentieth century as he had been in the last 
half of the nineteenth. 

The story of his terrible disillusion belongs to 
a later stage. At the time with which we are 
dealing, and indeed for nearly a year after 
William's accession in June of 1888, the ascend- 
ency of the Bismarcks was complete. Men with 
fewer infirmities of temper and feminine capacities 
for personal grudges and jealousies might possibly 
have maintained that ascendency, or the semblance 
of it, for years. But a long lease of absolute 
power had developed the petty sides of their 
characters. During the brief reign of Frederic 



112 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

they had had to suffer certain slights and rebuffs 
at the hands of his Liberal friends who were 
temporarily brought to the front. To their 
swollen amour propre nothing else seemed so 
important now as to avenge these indignities. 
The new Kaiser they thought of as wholly their 
man, and they proceeded to use him as a rod for 
the backs of their enemies. 

It remains a surprising thing that they were 
allowed to go so far in this evil direction before 
William revolted and called a halt. For what 
they did before a stop was put to their career it is 
impossible not to blame him as well as them. In 
truth, he began by being so wholly under their 
influence that even his own individual acts were 
coloured by their prejudices and hates. 

If he had been momentarily softened by the 
pathetic conditions surrounding his father's 
funeral, his heart steeled itself again soon enough 
under the sway of the Bismarcks. He entered 
with gratuitous zest upon a course of demonstra- 
tive disrespect to his father's memory. 

Frederic had been born in the spacious, rambling 
New Palace at Potsdam, and in adult life had made 
it his principal home. Here all his children save 
William were born, and here William himself 
spent his boyhood, as Mr. Bigelow has so plea- 
santly told us,i playing with his brother Henry 
' New Review ^ August, 1889. 



UNDER THE SWAY OF THE BISMARCKS. 113 

in their attic nursery, or cruising in their little toy 
frigate on the neighbouring lakes. Here Frederic 
at the end came home to die, and in the last 
fortnight of his life formally decreed that the 
name of the New Palace should henceforth be 
Friedrichskron — or Frederic's Crown. 

All who have seen the splendid edifice, em- 
bowered in the ancient royal forest parks, will 
recognize the poetic and historic fitness of the 
name. From its centre rises a dome, surmounted 
by three female figures supporting an enormous 
kingly crown. There was a time when Europe 
talked as much about this emblematic dome as we 
did a year or so ago about the Eiffel Tower, though 
for widely different reasons. It was not remarkable 
from any scientific point of view, but it embodied 
in visible bronze a colossal insult levelled by 
Frederic the Great at the three most powerful 
women in the world. When that tireless creature 
emerged from the Seven Years' War, he began 
busying himself by the construction of this palace. 
Everybody had supposed him to be ruined finan- 
cially, but he had his father's secret hoards almost 
intact, and during the six years 1763-9 drew 
from them over ^^2, 000,000 to complete this 
structure. With characteristic insolence he 
reared upon the dome, in the act of upholding his 
crown, three naked figures having the faces of 
Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria, 



114 I^HE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

and Mme. Pompadour of France, each with her 
back turned toward her respective country. The 
irony was coarse, but perhaps it may be forgiven 
to a man who had so notably come through the 
prolonged life-and-death struggle forced upon him 
by these women. 

At all events, it was an intelligent and proper 
thing to give the palace the name of Friedrichs- 
kron, and one would think that, even if the 
change had been less fitting than it was, the wish 
of the dying man about the house of his birth 
could not but command respect. 

One of William's first acts was to order the 
discontinuance of the new name, and in his pro- 
clamation he ostentatiously reverted to the former 
usage of "New Palace." 

To glance ahead for a moment, there came in 
September an even more painful illustration of 
the unfilial attitude to which William had hardened 
himself. The Deutsche Rundschau created a sudden 
sensation by printing the diary of Frederic, from 
July II, 1870, to March 12th of the following 
year, covering the entire French campaign and all 
the negotiations leading up to the formation of 
the German Empire. Quotations have already 
been made in these pages showing that this diary 
demonstrated authoritatively the fallacy of Bis- 
marck's claim to be the originator of the Empire. 
Frederic and the others had had, in fact, to drag 



UNDER THE SWAY OF THE BISMARCKS. 115 

him into a reluctant acceptance of the imperial 
idea. The shock of now all at once learning this 
was felt all over Germany. Every mind compre- 
hended that the blow had been aimed straight at 
the Chancellor's head. Nobody seemed to see, 
least of all Bismarck, that the diary really gave 
the Chancellor a higher title than that of inventor 
of the Empire, and revealed him as a wise, far- 
seeing statesman, who would not submit to the 
fascination of the imperial scheme until he made 
sure that its realization would be of genuine 
benefit to all Germany. So far, indeed, was he 
from recognizing this that he allowed the pub- 
lication to rob him of all control over his 
temper. 

The edition of the Rundschau was at once con- 
fiscated, and on September 23rd Bismarck sent a 
** report" to the Emperor upon the diary. He 
set up the pretence of doubting its genuineness as 
a cloak for saying the most brutal things about its 
dead author. The charge was openly made that 
Frederic could not be trusted with any State 
secrets owing to the fear of " indiscreet revelations 
to the English Court," and therefore " stood with- 
out the sphere of all business negotiations." 
Further, he asserted that the portions of the 
diary expressing willingness to force the Southern 
States into the Empire must be forgeries, because 
**such ideas are equally contemptible from the 



ii6 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

standpoint of honourable feeling and that of 
policy." In conclusion he pointed out that, even if 
the diary were genuine, Frederic in giving it for 
publication would be a traitor under Article XCII 
of the Penal Code. 

Of the genuineness of the diary there was, of 
course, no question whatever in anybody's mind, 
least of all in Bismarck's or William's. Yet the 
young Kaiser permitted this gross attack by the 
Chancellor upon his father's honour and patriotism 
to be officially published, and gave his consent to 
a prosecution of those responsible for the appear- 
ance of the diary in the Rtcndschau, 

The story of the prosecution is a familiar one. 
Dr. Geffcken was found to be the friend to whom 
Frederic had entrusted this portion of his diary, 
and he was arrested and thrown into prison, to be 
brought before the imperial tribunal at Leipsic. 
The ingrate Friedberg put his talents at the 
disposal of the Bismarcks to draw up the case 
against him. The houses of Geffcken and Baron 
von Roggenbach were ransacked, and a corre- 
spondence covering many years was seized and 
searched by Bismarck's emissaries. These letters 
were said to contain many compromising references 
to the Crown Princess, Princess Alice, Sir Robert 
Morier, and others whom Bismarck alleged to be 
in a conspiracy against him. This charge of 
being desirous of the Chancellor's downfall grew 



UNDER THE SWAY OF THE BISMARCK S. 117 

indeed to be the principal item in the attack upon 
Geffcken. 

The indictment for high treason was at last, on 
January 2, 1889, brought before the Judges of the 
Supreme Court of Judicature at Leipsic, and they 
threw it out with ignominious swiftness. Geffcken 
himself, badly broken in health and mind, was 
released on the 4th. This was Bismarck's first 
public mishap under the new reign, and it attracted 
much surprised attention at the time, as showing 
both the Chancellor's lack of intelligent self- 
restraint in getting into a fury over a revelation 
which really redounded to his credit, and his igno- 
rance of German law. The opening month of the 
year 1889, in which this happened, was invested 
with importance in another way, as we shall see 
in due course. 

But for the time, returning now to the middle of 
1888, William seemed to delight in exhibiting 
himself to the public eye as the man of the Bis- 
marcks. One of his earliest acts was to make a 
special journey to Friedrichsruh to visit the Chan- 
cellor, and the most popular photograph of the 
year was that representing him standing on the 
lawn in front of this chateau, in company with 
Bismarck and the famous ** Reichshund." In 
Berlin, too, people noted his custom of paying 
early morning calls at the house of Herbert Bis- 
marck, and wondered how long this enthusiastic 
3elf-abasement would last. 



ii8 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

While it did last, this influence of the Bismarcks 
was so powerful and all-pervasive that it is very 
difBcult to follow the thread of the young Kaiser's 
own personality through the busy period of his 
first half-year's reign. One continually confronts 
this embarrassment of inability to separate what 
he himself wanted to do from what was suggested 
by these powers behind the throne. We know 
now that the Kaiser possesses a strongly-marked 
individuality and an unusually active and fertile 
mind. Doubtless these asserted themselves a 
great deal at even this early stage, but there is 
little or nothing to guide us in distinguishing their 
effects. 

The truth seems to be that at this time, in these 
opening months of his reign, William's inclina- 
tions ran so wholly in Bismarckian channels that 
even what he himself initiated was in practice a 
part of the Bismarcks' work. 

This is especially true of the young Kaiser's 
first important step in the field of international 
politics. He had been on the throne for less than 
four weeks when he started off to pay a State visit 
to the Czar of Russia. He had not been invited, 
and it was apparent enough in Russian Court 
circles that his hasty and impulsive descent upon 
their summer leisure was as unwelcome as it was 
surprising. He himself appears to have been 
swayed both by memories of his grandfather's 



UNDER THE SWAY OF THE BISMARCKS. 119 

injunction to friendliness toward Russia, and by 
Bismarck's desire to make a demonstration of 
unfriendliness to England. 

This note of anti-English prejudice is dominant 
throughout all that immediately followed. During 
Frederic's brief tenure of power, in April of 1888, 
Queen Victoria had made a journey to Berlin, and 
had spent several days in the company of her 
dying son-in-law and afflicted daughter at the 
palace of Charlottenburg. Her coming was not 
at all grateful to the Junker class, and it was ren- 
dered highly unpopular among Berliners generally 
by a curiously tactless performance on the part of 
the Empress Frederic. To properly receive her 
royal mother it was necessary to refurnish and 
decorate a suite of rooms in the Charlottenburg 
Schloss, and orders were sent to London for all 
this new furniture, and for English workmen to 
make the needed alterations. As may be imagined, 
this slight upon the tradesmen and artizans of 
Berlin was deeply resented, and there was con- 
siderable ground for nervousness lest the Queen 
should have some manifestation of this dislike 
thrust upon her notice during her stay. Fortu- 
nately, this did not happen, but Prince William 
behaved so coldly toward his grandmother that her 
Majesty could have had no doubt as to the atti- 
tude of his friends. 
Later on, after Frederic's death, came confusecl 



I20 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

stones about the arbitrary and unjust way in which 
his widow had been treated, both personally and 
as regarded her property rights. These matters 
are all settled now, and were the subject of great 
exaggeration even then, but they created so much 
bad blood at the time that the Prince of Wales in 
the following autumn left Vienna upon a hastily 
improvised and wholly fictitious hunting tour, 
rather than remain and meet his nephew, Kaiser 
William, who was coming that way. 

Nothing very notable occurred during the July 
journeys to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, and 
the autumnal trip to Austria and Italy presented 
no incidents of importance save this sudden flight 
of the indignant Prince of Wales, and a distinctly 
unpleasant bungling of the visit to the Pope. 
This latter episode has become famous in the 
annals of Prussian brusqaeness and incivility. 
The young Kaiser in his white cuirassier uniform 
and eagle-capped helmet bluntly told the venerable 
Pontiff that his dreams of regaining temporal 
power were all childish nonsense, and the still 
ruder Herbert Bismarck broke up the interview by 
forcing his way into the Pope's private apartments, 
dragging amiable young Prince Henry with him as 
a pretext for his boisterous insolence. This was 
thought to be a smart trick at the time, and Her- 
bert and the German Ambassador openly chuckled 
pver it, 



UNDER THE SWAY OF THE BISMARCK S, 121 

William himself is said to have remarked to 
King Humbert after his return from the call upon 
Leo XIII : ** I have destroyed his illusions.'* At 
least the Holy Father no longer indulged illusions 
as to what the German Emperor was like — but in 
his mild, tranquil manner confided to certain 
members of his intimate household the pious 
fear that William was a conceited and head- 
strong young man, whose reign would end in 
disaster. 

These journeys did little more than confirm the 
world in sharing the Pope's unfavourable opinion 
of William. Both by his ostentatious visit to 
Russia before even his two allies of the triple 
compact had been greeted, and by his marked 
avoidance of England while visiting all the other 
maritime nations of the north, he was credited 
with desiring to offend the country of his mother's 
birth. That country returned his dislike with 
interest. 

Finally, on the ist day of January, 1889, he put 
the capstone upon this evil and unfilial reputation 
which he had been for a year building up in the 
minds of English-speaking people. Badly as the 
outside world thought of him by this time, it 
learned now with amazement that he had selected 
for special New Year's honours the ex-Minister 
Puttkamer. The one important act of Frederic's 
reign had been the dismissal of this man, to whom 



122 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

William now, with marks of peculiar distinction, 
gave the order of the Black Eagle. 

A groan of despairing disgust rose from every 
part of the globe where people were watching 
German affairs. How could any good thing what- 
soever be expected from such a son ? 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE BEGINNINGS OF A BENEFICENT CHANGE. 

The opening month of 1889 was a momentous 
period in the history of the young Emperor. The 
decoration of Puttkamer, who stood in all eyes as 
a type of the late Kaiser's bitterest and most 
malignant foes, put the finishing touch to the 
demonstrative unfilial stage of William's career. 
Men had been brought by this deed to think as 
badly of him as they could — when lo ! the whole 
situation suddenly changed. This crowning act 
of affront to his father's memory was also the 
last. From that very month it is a new William 
who presents himself for consideration. 

It is not possible to put the finger upon any 
one special cause for the change in the Kaiser's 
views and feelings which from this time began to 
manifest itself. There were in truth many reasons 



124 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

working together to effect this alteration, at once 
so subtle and so swift. 

In its essence the abrupt new departure was 
due to the awakened consciousness in William's 
mind that the Bismarcks had been making a fool 
of him. Royalty can bear any calamity better 
than this. The saying ascribed to Louis XVIII, 
" For the love of God, do not render me 
ridiculous!" puts into words the thought that 
has lain closest to every monarch's heart since 
kings have had a being. And it was in William's 
nature to regard himself and his position with 
exceptional seriousness. 

It would be extremely interesting to follow the 
mental processes by which William all at once 
reached this realizing sense of his position, and 
saw how poor and contemptible a figure he had 
been made to cut in the eyes of the civilized 
world. As it is, we can only glance briefly at the 
more obvious of the causes which led to this wel- 
come awakening. 

First of all, the High Court of Leipsic, on 
January 4th, threw out the indictment which Bis- 
marck had been so savagely pressing against Dr. 
Geffcken, for the treasonable publication of a part 
of the Emperor Frederic's diary. The official 
ransacking of all his correspondence, and that of 
his most intimate associates, had revealed nothing 
save additional proof that the late Princess Alice 



BEGINNINGS OF A BENEFICENT CHANGE. 125 

of Hesse, Sir Robert Morier, and Dr. Geffcken 
were close friends of Frederic and his wife — 
which, of course, everybody knew before, but 
which the Bismarckian journals had paraded 
afresh as a reason for new insults to the dead 
Kaiser's memory and to the widowed Empress 
Frederic. The prompt adverse decision of the 
court dealt a sharp blow to this scandalous abuse 
of power. 

In addition, the Bismarcks were meanwhile 
conducting a fierce public campaign against Sir 
Robert Morier, the British Ambassador at St. 
Petersburg — or rather, through him, against the 
honour of the late Emperor. Their accusation, 
based upon some alleged verbal statement of 
Marshal Bazaine, made at a time when he was 
most hopelessly discredited and new in exile, was 
that Frederic had systematically revealed the 
secrets of the German Army plans to Morier, who 
had sent them to England to be wired across to 
France. When Sir Robert Morier produced Ba- 
zaine's written denial of the alleged utterances and 
sent it to Herbert Bismarck, with a polite request 
for a withdrawal of the odious charge, he received 
a letter of refusal, couched in grossly insulting 
terms. This controvers}^ culminating about the 
time of the collapse of the Geffcken prosecution, 
no doubt contributed much to the opening of 
William's eyes. 



126 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

There were not wanting at Berlin clever people 
ready to take advantage of these foolish excesses 
of the arrogant and over-confident Bismarcks. 
Their arbitrary and despotic courses had offended 
many besides those who would naturally be 
opposed to them politically, and there now sprang 
up, as out of the earth, a singular combination ot 
the most diverse political elements, united only in 
their hatred for the Bismarcks. In this incon- 
gruous alliance Radicals and Jew-baiters joined 
hands, and ultra-Conservatives stood side by side 
with the Empress Frederic's Liberal faction. 
The headquarters of this odd combination were 
at the residence of Alfred Count von Waldersee. 

This powerful personage, who for years, as 
Quartermaster- General, was in training as 
Moltke's visible heir, and was until recently 
at the head of the greatest fighting machine the 
human race ever saw, is still but little known to 
the general public. This is because press popu- 
larity and interesting personal qualities and con- 
nections have nothing whatever to do with a 
man's promotion in the German Army. Heroic 
actions on the field advance him no more than 
does the advertising faculty in times of peace. 
He rises to each place because he is judged to be 
fittest for that particular post, and this judgment 
sternly sets aside all considerations not imme- 
diately concerned with the duties of that post. 



BEGINNINGS OF A BENEFICENT CHANGE. 127 

Thus it happens that of Count von Waldersee, 
who is one of the most important mihtary officers 
in the world, not much is known save that he is 
now grey and bald, and has for his wife a very 
astute and influential American lady. 

Twenty-seven years ago an elderly prince of the 
Schleswig-Holstein family produced a temporary 
sensation by renouncing his ancestral rank, in 
order to marry a beautiful young Miss Lee, whom 
he had met at Paris. He was then just the age 
of the century — sixty-four — and the bride, who, 
with true American courage, states the year of 
her birth in the Ahnanach de Gotha, was twenty- 
six. Less than a year later the bridegroom, who 
had been given the title of Prince de Noer at the 
Austrian Court, died in Syria. Nine years after- 
wards — in 1874 — his widow married Count Wal- 
dersee, and went to Berlin to live. 

It happened, in 1881, that young Prince Wil- 
liam of Prussia was wedded to a Schleswig- 
Holstein Princess, to whom the Countess 
Waldersee, by her first marriage, stood in the 
relation of great-aunt. Young William and 
Waldersee were already friends. This connection 
between their wives led to a closer intimacy, the 
results of which have been tremendous in Ger- 
many. 

I have said that the home of the Waldersees 
now became the centre of the rising opposition to 



128 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

the Bismarcks. Count Waldersee himself repre- 
sented the ancient Prussian nobles' traditions of 
an absolute monarchy and a Hohenzollern's un- 
limited kingly power — traditions which were all 
at war with this Bismarckian usurpation of 
authority. The Countess Waldersee, with the 
privilege of an American, was able to gather into 
association with this aristocratic conservatism 
many elements in German political life which, 
under any other roof than hers, would have been 
antagonistic. Here it was that the women's con- 
clave was formed— the young Empress Victoria 
and her widowed mother-in-law, the Empress 
Frederic, joining hands with the Countess Wal- 
dersee— with the blessing of the aged Empress 
Augusta, who all her life long had hated Bis- 
marck, resting upon their work. 

Bismarck had been supreme for so many years, 
and had put so many of these feminine cabals 
under his feet in bygone days, that he failed to 
recognize the deadly peril which confronted him 
in this newly-unmasked battery. He proceeded 
to charge upon it with all his old recklessness of 
confidence, and with his accustomed weapons of 
newspaper insults, personal browbeatings and 
threats to resign. To his great bewilderment 
nothing gave way. He had come at last upon a 
force greater than himself. He maintained the 
struggle for over a year — scornfully at first, and 



BEGINNINGS OF A BENEFICENT CHANGE. 129 

later with a despairing tenacity as pitiful as it 
was undignified, until at last he was fairly cud- 
geled off the field. 

This was the trick of it : Bismarck, in all his 
extended series of conquests over previous attacks 
by the women of the Court, had had the King at 
his back. He was supported by old William in 
his long campaign against the old Empress and 
the English Crown Princess. He had had the 
sanction of young William in his warfare upon 
the Empress Frederic. It had been with royal 
consent that he bore himself like the foremost 
man in Prussia, and he had allowed himself to 
forget the importance of this fact. The tables 
were completely turned upon him the instant 
these adroit and sagacious women whispered in 
young William's ear, " Why not be foremost man 
in Prussia yourself? '* 

The young Kaiser's thirtieth birthday came on 
January 27, 1889. We can put down to about 
that date his advance to an independent position 
in front of everybody else in his kingdom— in- 
cluding the Bismarcks. No single striking event 
marked the change; but the feeling that the 
change had come spread with strange swiftness 
throughout the length and breadth of Germany. 
The half-intuitive sense that Bismarck was done 
for ran like wildfire over the country. The Iron 
Chancellor for thirty years had done his best to 



I30 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

reduce German manhood to the serf-like condition 
of the courtier, and it is proverbial that there is 
no other keenness of scent like that of courtiers 
for the fall of a favourite. 

The open reconciliation between William and 
his mother belongs to a somewhat later period, 
but the spirit of it was already in the air. The 
terrible news of the death of Crown Prince 
Rudolph of Austria, which came on January 30th, 
is also to be taken into account as bearing upon 
this change at Berlin. The Austrian heir-apparent 
was only six months older than William, and of 
late years they had not been friends. Rudolph 
had been peculiarly intimate with the Prince of 
Wales and with the late Emperor Frederic, and 
had not concealed his sympathy with the English 
view of William's behaviour. His tragic ending 
now produced the most painful and softening 
effect upon the emotional young Kaiser. He 
could only be restrained from going incognito 
to the funeral at Vienna by the urgent pleas of 
the stricken Austrian Emperor, and he made 
obviously sincere expressions of grief to the friends 
of the Prince of Wales, which went far toward 
removing the ill-feelings between them. 

As it became apparent that the young Kaiser 
had thrown off his Bismarckian leading-strings, 
and, after a miserable interlude of small personal 
persecutions and revenges, was at last coming to 



BEGINNINGS OF A BENEFICENT CHANGE. 1 3 1 

comprehend the vastness of his duties and re- 
sponsibilities, the world began watching him with 
an interest of another sort. 

It was not easy for outsiders to follow with 
much clearness the details of the fight which 
Bismarck was now making to retain his position 
and prestige. No one but a German politician 
could understand the excitement about the ap- 
pointment of the National Liberal, von Bennig- 
sen, to the Governorship of Hanover — an act, by 
the way, which definitely ranged the ultra-Tories 
against Bismarck — or apprehend the significance 
of Bismarck's fruitless attempts to secure the dis- 
missal of Court Chaplain Stocker, who was too 
much a partisan of Waldersee's. The general 
public preferred rather to study the personality of 
the young Kaiser as revealed by his individual 
acts and utterances. 

William's fondness for travelling had from the 
first attracted attention. It is not generally 
known that in order to gratify this taste he at the 
beginning of his reign decided to devote to it the 
money which would be saved by foregoing a coro- 
nation ceremony. This decision accorded with 
historic Prussian precedents. From the year 
1701, when Prussia was raised to royal estate, 
and the first King was crowned with such memor- 
able and costly pomp at Konigsberg, no Hohenzol- 
lern had a coronation ceremony until William I 

9 



132 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

put the crown upon his own head in October of 
1861. Each of the intervening monarchs held 
instead what is called a Hudligung, or solemn 
homage from the assembled representatives of the 
estates of the realm — a curious ceremonial relic 
from feudal times which survived into the present 
century in its antique form as a public function in 
the Schloss Platz. William I's avowed reason 
for breaking over the rule was that during his 
predecessor's reign a Constitution had been pro- 
mulgated in Prussia, and that this new-fangled 
innovation rendered it necessary to remind people 
anew of the powers and prerogatives of the 
monarch by visible signs of crown and sceptre. 

Young William was so enthusiastic a follower 
of his grandfather that people assumed he would 
imitate him in this, all the more because his own 
tastes are toward display. Upon this theory there 
has been a great deal printed about a forthcoming 
coronation which never comes. Only last year an 
unusually impressive statement appeared to the 
effect that William, moved by meditating upon the 
historic splendours of the old Holy Roman Em- 
pire, intended to have himself crowned German 
Emperor in the famous mediaeval church of the 
ancient imperial city of Frankfort-on-the-Main. 
The idea is a beautiful one, but there is no fact at 
the back of it. According to William's present 
intention, he will not be crowned at alL 



BEGINNINGS OF A BENEFICENT CHANGE. 133 

In the restless course of his travels during these 
first six months William had made numerous 
speeches, almost every one of which contained a 
sentence or two of enough significance to be re- 
printed everywhere. As a rule his utterances at 
foreign Courts were polite and amiable to a fault, 
while his speeches at home, made among cheering 
after-dinner audiences in various parts of Ger- 
many, were characterized by much violent extra- 
vagance of language. The most intemperate of 
these harangues were reserved for his State visits 
to the provincial divisions of Prussia. At the 
beginning of last year, on the occasion of a visit 
of this nature to Konigsberg, capital of East 
Prussia, he was led by his enthusiasm into so 
fervid a strain of eloquence, and flourished the 
metaphorical sword so recklessly, that one of the 
Russian papers ironically congratulated the world 
upon the fact that Prussia only had thirteen pro- 
vinces, and that the Kaiser had now exhausted 
the rhetorical possibilities of eleven of them. 

The earliest and most interesting of these 
speeches was delivered at Frankfurt-am-Oder 
just two months after his accession. He referred 
of his own volition to the undoubtedly foolish 
talk that had been heard during his father's brief 
reign, of Frederic's alleged idea of giving back 
Alsace-Lorraine, an imputation which William 
characterized as shameful to his father's memory. 



134 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

** There is upon this point but one mind," he went 
on amid loud hurrahs, *' namely, that our eigh- 
teen army corps, and our 42,000,000 people should 
be left upon the field rather than that we should 
permit a solitary stone of what we have gained to 
be taken from us." 

Equally characteristic, and perhaps even more 
important as a clue to the manner in which the 
young Kaiser's conceptions of his position shaped 
themselves, was his celebrated rebuke to the 
Burgomaster and municipal authorities of Berlin, 
which has for its date, October 28 1888. That we 
may the better comprehend this, it will be well to 
glance for a moment at the remarkable develop- 
ment of the new Berlin. 

Twenty years ago — that is to say, when the 
Empire was founded — Berlin was of course much 
the largest city within the new German boundaries, 
but it was scarcely a capital in the sense that 
Paris, Vienna, or London is. Frankfurt-am-Main 
was the great banking centre of Germany ; Ham- 
burg was its commercial metropolis; Dresden, 
Hanover, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and even smaller 
towns were more esteemed as places of fashion- 
able residence and resort. Berlin was big and 
powerful, and rich in manufactures, no doubt, but 
nobody thought of it as beautiful or attractive, and 
nobody wanted to live there who could maintain 
himself in pleasanter surroundings. 



BEGINNINGS OF A BENEFICENT CHANGE. 135 

The change which has been wrought in all this 
since 1870 is only to be matched by the pheno- 
menal growth of great cities in the American West. 
Europe has seen nothing like it before. Within 
these twenty years Berlin has grown like a veri- 
table Chicago. And not only has it attracted 
to itself hundreds of thousands of new citizens, 
and spread itself out on the Brandenburg plain 
over new square miles of stately brick and mortar 
and asphalt, but it has sapped the pre-eminence 
of its more ancient rivals, each in its speciality. 
Berlin has so absorbed the monetary power of the 
Empire that Frankfort is now scarcely thought of 
as a banking centre at all, and even Amsterdam 
and Paris are dwarfed financially. In similar 
fashion, the German nobility and wealthy classes, 
instead of scattering their town homes among a 
dozen local centres of social life, swarm now all to 
Berlin, and bid so strenuously for available build- 
ing sites that prices for land and houses and floor 
rents are higher there than anywhere else in 
Europe. 

Obviously, it is the establishment of the im- 
perial Court in BerHn which has done this, and 
both the strength and weakness of the imperial 
system are reflected in greatest perfection of form 
and colour in the social conditions of this mighty 
new metropolis. 

The enormous concentration here of rich or 



136 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

pretentious young nobles in the various regiments 
of the Guard Corps; of the ablest and most in- 
fluential soldiers of Germany in the General Staff 
and the central military offices ; of the cleverest 
politicians and administrators in the various civic 
departments, and of the great aristocratic and 
monied classes who must live where the Court 
is settled and the Reichstag meets and the finance 
of Europe is controlled — all this makes Berlin a 
peculiarly responsive mirror of the ideas and 
methods of German government. 

In turn Berlin has imposed its character with 
increasing force upon the whole German people. 
The dear old indolent, amiable, incapable, happy- 
go-lucky, waltz-loving Vienna used to be the type 
of what people had in mind when they spoke 
of the sentimental German. Berlin has made 
Vienna seem now as remote and non-German 
almost as Pesth itself, and instead has impressed 
its own strongly-marked individuality upon the 
new Empire — energetic, exact, harsh under slight 
provocation, methodical as the multiplication 
table, coldly just to law-abiding people, and a fire- 
and-steel terror to everybody else. 

As might be naturally expected in this bustle of 
busy officials, of bankers and merchants burdened 
with a novel wealth, of the ceaseless rattle of 
bayonets and clatter of swords and spurs, art and 
literature are pretty well pushed to the wall. The 



BEGINNINGS OF A BENEFICENT CHANGE. 137 

vast new growth of Berlin and the rush toward it 
of German wealth, rank, and fashion, have drawn 
in their train a certain current of painters and 
v^^riters, but nothing at all in proportion with the 
expansion in other lines of activity. Berlin's new 
supremacy has not affected Leipsic as the book 
centre of German-speaking people, or Munich and 
Diisseldorf as homes of art study. 

These changes may come, too, in time, par- 
ticularly if the young Emperor exerts himself to 
achieve such an end. Up to the present, he has 
been too busy even to think of such a thing. The 
exactions of his daily routine of labour are so great 
that he simply has no time for the softer and more 
intellectual side of life, even if the taste were there. 
He has found leisure to sit for several portraits 
since his accession, but that seems to have been 
the sum of his attention to art. As for literature, 
an observant official in Berlin assured me of his 
conviction that William had not had the time to 
read a single book since his accession. 

Whatever may come in the future, it is undeni- 
able that the author now cuts a poor figure in 
Berlin. The city's drift is toward material things 
— toward business, official rank, and martial per- 
fection. Even the most prosperous and popular 
writers of books in Berlin strive to obtain some 
small post in the civil service in order to command 
social position. Among many instances of this 



138 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

brought to my notice one will serve as an illustra- 
tion. Ernst von Wilderbruch is the most success- 
ful of contemporary Berlin playwrights, but on his 
card you will read that he is a Counsellor of Lega- 
tion at the Foreign Office. This office yields him 
a salary equal to a twentieth part of his income 
from his plays, but it is of the greatest importance 
to him because it insures his rank. Here in Eng- 
land Edmund Gosse has an official place— just as 
in Boston Robert Grant holds a post in the muni- 
cipal service. But can you fancy either of these 
gentlemen putting the fact on his card, or pre- 
ferring to be known as an official rather than as a 
writer ? 

Even the splendid University of Berlin exerts a 
liberalizing influence rather through the public 
political attitude of its professors than by the dif- 
fusion of literary tastes among the community. 
This fact, together with the recollections which 
associate the late Emperor Frederic with bookish 
people, and the irritated consciousness that a very 
large proportion of Germany's present authors are 
Jews and Radicals, gives the contemptuous attitude 
of Berlin's aristocratic and military classes toward 
literature a decided political twist. 

This is rendered the more marked by the over- 
whelming Radicalism of the city's electorate. The 
immense balloon-like rise of the value of land, and 
the tremendous race to erect buildings everywhere, 



BEGINNINGS OF A BENEFICENT CHANGE. 1 39 

brought to the city a great concourse of artizans 
and labourers from all parts of Germany. Com- 
petition gave them big wages, but it also incited 
the formation of powerful trades' unions, the best 
of which were in effect Radical clubs, and the worst 
of which became centres of Socialist agitation. 
Berlin has six members in the Reichstag, of which 
four are Radicals, or Frcisinnige,dind two are Social 
Democrats. One of the Radicals is Prof. Rudolph 
Virchow, and one of the Socialists is Paul Singer, 
a Jew. The municipal institutions of Berlin, so 
far as they depend upon the popular vote, are also 
in the hands of the Radicals. 

So much for the new Berlin. On Oct. 28, 1888, 
William, who had just returned from his Italian 
visit, the last of his series of journeys for that year, 
received the Burgomaster and a delegation from 
the Town Council, who came to the Schloss to 
congratulate him upon his return. They presented 
an effusively loyal address, clearly intended as a 
peace-offering from the Radical city to the new 
sovereign, and announced the intention of erecting 
a great fountain in the Schloss-Platz to comme- 
morate the event. 

William received this polite expression with 
studied insolence. After ironically commenting 
upon the unexpectedness of such a demonstration, 
he brusquely told them to build more churches in 
Berlin and to choke off their Radical editors, who. 



I40 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

during his absence, had shamelessly discussed the 
most private affairs of his family. He had been 
particularly angered by their insistence upon draw- 
ing comparisons between himself and his late 
father, an affront which he would not longer tole- 
rate. He was about to take up his residence in 
Berlin, and ** considering the relations which ex- 
isted between the municipal authorities of Berlin 
and this Radical section of the press," he con- 
cluded that his hearers could stop this editorial 
impudence if they liked. Their address was full 
of loyal professions ; very well, let them put these 
into practice. 

Having said this in his roughest manner, 
WilHam turned on his heel and left the room 
without shaking hands with the Burgomaster or 
so much as nodding to his colleagues. 

This happened four months or so before the 
change in the young Kaiser's views and attitude 
which has been dealt with above. It is not out of 
place here, however, because, although William 
was now swiftly and with steady progress to alter 
his opinions on most other public subjects, he has 
not even yet altogether outgrown the notion that 
editors ought to wear muzzles. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTAL ABSOLUTISM. 

The young Emperor's dislike for the press was 
indeed a fruitful source of sensational incidents 
during the first year or two of his reign, and still 
is uneasily felt to contain the elements of possibly 
further disturbance. The fault of this attitude is 
by no means entirely on one side. Both the 
character of the Kaiser and the character of the 
German press are in large part what Bismarck 
has made them, and if their less admirable sides 
clash and grind into each other with painful fric- 
tion from time to time, it is only what might be 
expected. During Bismarck's twenty-eight years 
of power in Prussia he so by turns debauched and 
coerced the press that the adjective *' reptile " had 
to be invented by outsiders properly to describe its 
venomous cowardice. He openly and qontemp- 



142 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

tuously prostituted it to serve his poorest and 
pettiest uses, so that it was not possible for any 
one to think of it with respect ; yet, oddly enough, 
he always showed the keenest and most thin- 
skinned sensitiveness when its attacks or inuen- 
does were aimed at himself. 

This whimsical susceptibility to affront in the 
printed word, no matter how mean or trivial the 
force back of it, is a trait which has often come 
near making Bismarck ridiculous, and it is not 
pleasant to note how largely William seems also to 
be possessed with it. He is as nervous about what 
the papers will say as a young debutante on the 
stage. Not only does he keep an anxious watch 
upon the talk of the German editors, but he 
ordains a vigilant scrutiny of the articles printed 
in foreign countries from the pens of correspon- 
dents stationed at Berlin. In this he is very 
German. Nobody in England, for example, ever 
dreams of caring about, or for the most part of 
even taking the trouble to learn, what is printed 
abroad about English personages or politics. The 
foreign correspondents in London are as free as 
the wind that blows. But matters were ordered 
very differently at the beginning of the present 
reign in Berlin, and to this day journalists pursue 
their calling there under a sense of espionage 
hardly to be imagined in Fleet Street. It is true 
that a change for the better is distinctly visible of 



A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTAL ABSOLUTISM. 143 

late, but it will be the work of many years to eradi- 
cate the low views of German journalism which 
Bismarck instilled, alike, unfortunately, in the 
royal palaces and the editorial offices of Prussia. 

One of the very first acts of William's reign was 
the expulsion from Berlin of two French journalists 
whose sympathetic accounts of his father's dis- 
missal of Puttkamer had been distasteful to the 
royal eye. In the following January the corre- 
spondents of the Figaro and National of Paris 
were similarly driven out. In March, 1889, simul- 
taneously with the seizure of the Berlin Volks- 
Zeitung and the prosecution of the Freisinnige 
Zeitung, a new Penal Code was presented to the 
Reichstag which contained such arbitrary provi- 
sions for stamping out the remaining liberties of 
the press that even the Cologne Gazette denounced 
it as " putting a frightful weapon into the hands 
of the Government for suppressing freedom of 
speech and silencing opposition." This measure 
did not pass, but the odium of having introduced 
it remained. 

Although in other respects William was already 
observed to be separating himself from his Chan- 
cellor, it is clear that he has a large share in this 
odium. All his utterances, both at this time and 
up to the present date, show how thoroughly he 
believes in editing the editors. This tendency was 
during the year 1889 to exhibit its comical side. 



144 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

The special organ of the Waldersee party was the 
high-and-dry old Tory journal, the Kreuz-Zeitung, 
Early in the year this mouthpiece of the anti- 
Bismarck coalition was raided by the Chancellor, 
and both its offices and the house of its editor, 
Baron Hammerstein, ransacked for incriminating 
documents. The Kaiser is believed to have inter- 
vened to prevent more serious steps being taken. 
Later in the year, as the success of the Waldersee 
combination in weaning the Kaiser away from 
Bismarck grew more and more marked, the KreuZ' 
ZeiUmg foolishly gave voice to its elation, and 
attacked the " Cartel " coalition of parties which 
controlled the Reichstag. The Kaiser thereupon 
printed a personal conimuniqite in the official paper 
saying that he approved of the " Cartel " and was 
" unable to reconcile the means by which the 
Kreuz-Zeitung assailed it with respect for his own 
person." This warning proved insufficient, for in 
the following January Baron Hammerstein put up 
as a candidate for a vacancy at Bielefeld, and 
talked so openly about being the real nominee of 
the Kaiser that William caused to be inserted in all 
the papers a notice of his order that the Kreuz- 
Zeitung should not henceforth be taken at any of 
the royal palaces, or allowed in public reading- 
rooms. It may be imagined how the Liberal editors 
chuckled over this. 

So recently as in May of last year, two months 



A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTAL ABSOL UTISM, 145 

after the retirement of Bismarck, wlien the regular 
official deputation from the new Reichstag waited 
upon William, he pointed out to the Radical 
members that the Freisinnige press was criticizing 
the army estimates, which he and his generals 
had made as low as possible, and sharply warned 
them to see that a stop was put to such conduct 
on the part of their friends, the Radical editors. 
And only last December, in his remarkable speech 
to the Educational Conference, he lightly grouped 
journalists with the " hunger candidates " and 
others who formed an over-educated class "dan- 
gerous to society.'* 

This inability to tolerate the expression of 
opinions different from his own is very Bis- 
marckian. The ex-Chancellor, in fact, has for 
years past acted and talked upon the theory that 
anybody who did not agree with him must of 
necessity be unpatriotic, and came at kst to hurl 
the epithet of Reichsfeind — enemy of the Empire — 
every time any one disputed him on any point 
whatsoever. 

William has roughly shorn away Bismarck's 
pretence to infallibility, but about the divine 
nature of his own claims he has no doubt. Some 
of his deliverances on questions of morals and 
ethics, in his capacity as a sort of helmeted 
Northern Pope, are calculated to bring a smile to 
the face of the Muse of History. His celebrated 



146 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

harangue to the Rector of the Berlin University, 
Professor Gebhardt, wherein he complained that, 
under the lead of democratic professors, the vStudents 
were filled with destructive political doctrines, and 
concluded by gruffly saying, *' Let your students 
go more to churches and less to beer cellars and 
fencing saloons " — was put down to his youth, for 
it dates from the close of 1888. It is interesting 
to note, from William's recent speech at Bonn, 
that he has decidedly altered his views on both 
beer-drinking and duelling among students. He 
began his reign, however, with ultra-puritanical 
notions on these as well as other subjects. 

Long after this early deliverance his confidence 
in himself, so far from suffering abatement, had 
so magnified itself that he called the professors 
of another University together and lectured them 
upon the bad way in which they taught history. 
He had discovered, he said, that there was now 
much fondness for treating the French Revolution 
as a great political movement, not without its 
helpful and beneficent results. This pernicious 
notion must no longer be encouraged in German 
universities, but students should be taught to re- 
gard the whole thing as one vast and unmitigated 
crime against God and man. 

In this dogmatic phase of his character William 
is much more like Frederic Wilham I than like 
any of his nearer ancestors in the Hohenzollern 



A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTAL ABSOLUTISM. 147 

line. These later monarchs, beginning with 
Frederic the Great and following his luminous 
example, were habitually chary about bothering 
themselves with their subjects* opinions. William 
at one time thought a good deal upon the fact 
that he was a successor of Frederic the Great, 
and by fits and starts set himself to imitate the 
earlier acts of that sovereign. His restless 
flying about from place to place, and, even more 
clearly, his edicts rebuking the army officers for 
gambling and for harshness to their men, were 
copied from that illustrious original. But in his 
attitude toward the mental and moral liberty of 
his subjects he goes back a generation to Frederic's 
father — and suggests to us also the reflection that 
he is a grandson of that highly self-confident 
gentleman whom English-speaking people knew 
as the Prince Consort. 

Frederic the Great had so little of this spirit 
in him that he made himself memorably unique 
among eighteenth-century sovereigns by allowing 
such freedom to the press that liberty sank into 
license, and the most scandalous and mendacious 
attacks upon, his personal life were printed in and 
hawked about Berlin to the end of his days. As 
for his refusal to interfere in the alleged perversion 
of Protestant children by Catholic teachers, his 
comment on the margin of the ministerial com- 
plaint, ** In this country every man m.ust get to 

10 



148 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

heaven in his own way," is justly cherished to this 
day as worth all his other writings put together. 

William's spasms, so to speak, of imitative 
loyalty to the memories of his ancestors have been 
productive of many curious, not tg say diverting, 
results. Their progressive consecutiveness is not 
always easy to make out, but they afford, as a 
whole, very interesting insights into the young 
man's temperament. 

When tragic chance thrust him forward and upon 
the throne, his youthful imagination happened to 
be in some mysterious way under the spell of that 
most astounding of all his forefathers, Frederic 
William I. He spoke frequently with enthu- 
siasm of the character of this rude, choleric 
barbarian, and even brought himself to believe 
that there was something fine in that strange 
creature's inability to speak any language but 
German. It was under the sway of this admira- 
tion for the second Prussian King that William, 
in January of 1889, had all the French cooks in 
his palaces discharged, and ordered that hereafter 
the royal bill of fare should be a Speisekarte, with 
the names of dishes in German, instead of the 
accustomed menu in French. It will not, however, 
have escaped notice that William is a changeable 
young man, and this ultra-Teutonic mood did not 
last very long. In the following autumn he had 
so far recovered from it that his visit to Constanti- 



A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTAL ABSOLUTISM. 149 

nople was reported to have been marred by the 
Sultan's mistaken hospitality in giving him nothing 
but German champagnes to drink. It must be 
admitted, however, that scarcely the most robust 
prejudice could stand out long under such a test. 

In the spring of 1890 there came the 150th 
anniversary of the accession of Frederic the Great, 
and with it a sudden shift in the young Kaiser's 
admiration. For a long time thereafter he made 
no speech without alluding to this most splendid 
figure in Prussian history, and quoting him as an 
example to be followed with reverential loyalty. 

Then in December came the turn of still a 
third bygone HohenzoUern. It was on December 
I, 1640, that the youth of twenty, who was later 
to be known as the Great Elector, entered upon 
the herculean task of saving hapless, bankrupt little 
Brandenburg from literal annihilation. William 
has told us that as a boy he scarcely learned any- 
thing at all about this illustrious ancestor of his. 
Apparently little had been done to make good this 
lack of information up to the time when, toward 
the close of 1890, he found that the Great Elector's 
250th anniversary was near at hand, and felt that 
it ought to be celebrated. He began reading the 
history of that memorable reign, and was at once 
excitedly interested and impressed. There has 
always been a charming, if childish, naivete about 
the manner in which William frankly exposes his 



I50 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

mental processes, and, having just heard of some- 
thing for the first time which everybody else 
knows, brings it forward to public notice as if it 
were a fresh and most remarkable discovery. The 
effect produced upon him by his belated intro- 
duction to the life and works of the last Elector 
affords an apt illustration of this tendency. At 
the celebration William made a long speech in 
eulogy of his ancestor, which in every sentence 
seemed to take it for granted that heretofore no 
one had written or thought or known about the 
Great Elector. Since that time the young Emperor 
has rarely spoken in public, at least to a Prussian 
audience, without some reference to this distin- 
guished predecessor — whereas we never hear now 
of either Frederic the Great or his savage father. 

Doubtless the fervour with which William has 
adopted the Great Elector as his model ancestor 
is in large part due to the fact that the latter's 
first important act was the summary dismissal of 
his father's Prime Minister, Schwar^enberg. The 
parallel to be drawn between the disgrace of this 
powerful favourite and the fall of Bismarck is 
often faulty and nowhere exact, but it is evident 
that it impressed William's imagination greatly 
when he came upon it, and that he could not 
resist the temptation to suggest it to the world at 
large. In this same anniversary speech he said : 
** My stout ancestor had no one to lean upon. 



A YEAR OF EXPERIMENTAL ABSOLUTISM, 151 

The eminent statesman who had served his prede- 
cessor was revealed to have worked for his own 
personal ends, and the young sovereign was forced 
to mark out his own path unaided." The com- 
parison was a cruel one, because the manner in 
which Schwarzenberg "worked for his own per- 
sonal ends " was that of taking bribes to betray 
his royal master and his country. Yet the loose 
phrase could also describe Bismarck's hot-headed 
use of his vast governmental powers to crush his 
individual enemies, and in this sense every one 
felt that William was instituting a comparison. 

But this embittered remark belongs to a much 
later period than has as yet come under our view, 
and marks an acute stage of the dramatic and 
momentous quarrel between Kaiser and Chancellor, 
of the dawning of which there were only vague 
anticipatory rumours in 1889. 



CHAPTER IX. 

A YEAR OF HELPFUL LESSONS. 

The first few months of 1889 present nothing of 
special note to the observer. There was perhaps 
a trifle more nervousness on the bourses during 
that early spring-time which, for some occult 
reason, is the chosen season of alarmist war 
rumours, than had been usual in the lifetime of 
the old Kaiser, but this signified no more than a 
vague uneasiness born of the sword-clanking 
reputation which had preceded William's acces- 
sion to the throne. The surface of events at 
Berlin seemed smooth enough, although dis- 
sensions and jealousies were warring fiercely 
underneath. Everybody was talking about the 
tremendous battle going on between the Bismarcks 
and the Waldersees, but of public evidence of this 
conflict there was none. This very reticence 



154 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

shows that the Chancellor must thus early have 
become impressed with the menacing power of 
the combinations confronting him, for it was 
never his habit to be silent about quarrels in which 
he was confident of victory. He must have be- 
come truly alarmed when, on February 25th, he 
gave a great dinner, at which the Kaiser and 
Waldersee were the principal guests. So far from 
creating a false impression of cordiality, this 
banquet, with its incongruous people and its 
hollow gaiety, only strengthened the notion that 
Bismarck was toppling. 

In May, however, two things happened which 
at the time much occupied the world's attention 
— the abortive Strasburg visit incident and the 
great miners* strike in Westphalia. These two 
episodes are particularly noteworthy in that they 
for the first time show us William confronted by 
something bigger than questions of personal 
politics and individual piques and prejudices. A 
dangerous international quarrel and a threatening 
domestic convulsion loomed up suddenly side by 
side before him — and the experience left him a 
wiser and more serious man. 

To glance first at the incident which, creating 
the greater furor at the time, has left the slighter 
mark upon history — the King of Italy, with his 
son and his Premier, came, on May 21st, to visit 
William in Berlin. There were many reasons 



A YEAR OF HELPFUL LESSONS. 155 

why the reception extended to him should have 
been, as indeed it was, of the most affectionate 
and enthusiastic character. The old Emperor 
William had grown to be considered at the 
Quirinal as Victor Emmanuel's best friend, and 
Prussia was proudly pleased to be thought of as 
the chief protector and sponsor of young United 
Italy. The more romantic Frederic had culti- 
vated a highly sentimental intimacy, later on, 
with King Humbert and Queen Marguerite, and 
had made all Rome a party to it by that celebrated 
spectacular appearance on the balcony of the 
Quirinal with the little Italian Crown Prince in 
his arms. Thus peculiarly emotional ties bound 
Humbert now to Frederic's son, and his coming 
to Berlin was hailed as the arrival of a warm 
personal friend even more than as the advent of a 
powerful ally. 

It may have been from mere lightness of heart 
— conceivably there was a deeper motive— but at 
all events William proposed to this good friend 
that on his way home they should together visit 
Strasburg, and the amiable Humbert, a slow, 
patient, honest fellow, consented. The assertion 
has since been authoritatively made by Italian 
statesmen that the idea really originated with the 
adventurous Italian Premier, Crispi, and that 
Bismarck and William merely fell in with it. 
Uowever that may be, it is a fact that the vi^it 



156 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

was agreed upon, and that orders were despatched 
to Strasburg to make things ready for the royal 
party. 

When the news of this intended trip became 
public, its effect was that of a shock of earthquake. 
During the twenty-four hours which elapsed before 
the frightened Crispi could issue a statement that 
the report of such a visit was a pure Bourse canard, 
Europe was sensibly nearer a war than at any time 
in the last fifteen years. The French press raised 
a clamorous and vibrant call to arms, and the 
politicians of Rome and Vienna kept the wires to 
Berlin hot with panic-stricken protests. What it 
all meant was, of course, that Europe has tacitly 
consented to regard the possession of Alsace- 
Lorraine as an open question, to be finally settled 
when France and Germany fight next time. Upon 
this understanding, no outside sovereign has 
formally sanctioned the annexation of 187 1 by ap- 
pearing in person within the disputed territory. 
King Humbert's violation of this point of inter- 
national etiquette would have been a deliberate 
blow in the face of the French Republic. Luckily 
he had the courage to draw back when the light- 
nings began playing upon his path, and with di- 
minishing storm mutterings the cloud passed 
away. Its net result had been to show the world 
William's foolhardiness in favouring such a wanton 
insult to France, and his huniiliation in having 



A YEAR OF HELPFUL LESSONS. 157 

publicly to abandon an advertised intention — and 
the spectacle was not reassuring. 

The episode is chiefly interesting now because 
it seems to have been of great educational value 
to the young Emperor. It really marked out for 
him, in a striking object lesson, the grave inter- 
national limitations by which his position is 
hemmed in. He has never since made another 
such false step. Indeed the solitary other cause 
of friction between France and Germany which 
has arisen during his reign proceeded from an 
action of a diametrically opposite nature — to wit, 
an attempt to conciliate instead of offend. 

Of much more permanent importance in the 
history of William and of his Empire was the great 
miners' strike in Westphalia, which may be said 
to have begun on the ist of May. This tremendous 
upheaval of labour at one time involved the idle- 
ness of over 100,000 men — by no means all miners 
or all Westphalians. The shortened coal supply 
affected industries everywhere, and other trades 
struck because the spirit of mutiny was in the air. 
In many districts the military were called out to 
guard the pits' mouths, and sanguinary conflicts 
with the strikers ensued. 

Evidently this big convulsion took William 
completely by surprise. Up to this time he had 
been deeply engrossed in the spectacular side of 
his position — the showy and laborious routine of 



158 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

an Emperor who is also a practical working 
soldier. Such thought as he had given to the 
great economic problems pressing for solution all 
about him, seems to have been of the most casual 
sort and cast wholly in the Bismarckian mould. 
What Bismarck's views on this subject were and 
are, is well known. He believes that over-education 
has filled the labouring classes of Germany with 
unnatural and unreasonable discontent, which is 
sedulously played upon by depraved Socialist agi- 
tators, and that the only way to deal with the 
trouble is to imprison or banish as many of these 
latter as possible, and crush out the disaffection by 
physical force wherever it manifests itself. He 
decorates this position with varying sophistical 
frills and furbelows from time to time, but in its 
essence that is what he thinks. And up to May 
of 1889 that is apparently what William thought, 
too. 

The huge proportions of this sudden revolt of 
labour made William nervous, however, and in 
this excited state he was open to new impressions. 
The anti-Bismarck coalition saw their chance and 
swiftly utilized it. With all haste they summoned 
Dr. Hinzpeter from his home at Bielefeld, and per- 
suaded William to confer with his old tutor upon 
this alarming industrial complication, with which 
it was clearly enough to be seen his other advisers 
did not know how to deal. No exact date is given 



A YEAR OF HELPFUL LESSONS, 159 

for the interview which William had with Dr. 
Hinzpeter, but the day upon which it was held 
should be a memorable one in German history. 
For then dawned upon the mind of the young 
Kaiser that dream of Christian Socialism with the 
influence of which we must always thereafter 
count. 

It is true that the angered and dispossessed ex- 
Chancellor declares now that William never was 
morally affected by the painful aspects of the 
labour question, and that he took the side of the 
workmen solely because he thought it would pay 
politically. But men who know the Kaiser equally 
well, and who have the added advantage of speak- 
ing dispassionately, say that the new humanitarian 
views which Dr. Hinzpeter now unfolded to him 
took deep hold upon his imagination, and made a 
lasting mark upon his character. Even if the 
weight of evidence were not on its side, one would 
like to believe this rather than the cynical theory 
propounded from Friedrichsruh. 

William did not become a full-fledged economic 
philosopher all at once under this new influence. 
There was a great deal of the rough absolutist in 
the little harangue he delivered to the three work- 
ing-men delegates who, on May 14th, were ad- 
mitted to his presence to lay the case of the 
strikers before him. He listened gravely to their 
recital of grievances, asked numerous questions, 



i6o THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

and seemed considerably impressed. When their 
spokesman had finished he said that he was 
anxiously watching the situation, had ordered a 
careful inquiry into all the facts, and would see 
that evenhanded justice was done. Then, in a 
sharper voice, he warned them to avoid like 
poison all Socialist agitators, and specially to see 
to it that there were no riots or attempts to pre- 
vent the non-strikers from working. If this warning 
was not heeded, he concluded, in high peremptory 
tones, he would send his troops " to batter and 
shoot them down in heaps." 

It must be admitted that this sentiment does 
not touch the high-water mark of Christian 
Socialism, but the drift of the Kaiser's mind was 
obviously forward. Two days later he received a 
delegation of mine masters, and to them spoke 
rather bitterly of the perversity and greed of 
capitalists, and their selfish unwillingness to 
" make certain sacrifices in order to terminate 
this perilous and troublous state of things." On 
May 17th it was announced that Dr. Hinzpeter 
had been commissioned to travel through the dis- 
turbed districts and report to the Kaiser upon the 
origin and merits of the strike. This practically 
settled the matter. The masters as a whole made 
concessions, under which work was resumed. 
Those owners who displayed stubbornness were 
in one way or another made tP feel the imperial 



A YEAR OF HELPFUL LESSONS. i6i 

displeasure, and soon the trouble was at an end. 
It is worthy of note that Germany has since that 
time been far less agitated by labour troubles than 
any of the states by which she is surrounded, and 
that upon the occasion of the recent May-day 
demonstrations German workmen were practically 
the only ones on the Continent who did not come 
into collision with the police. 

But, after all, the vitally important thing was 
the reappearance of Dr. Hinzpeter, involving, as 
it did, the revival in the young Kaiser's daily 
thoughts and moods of the gentle and softening 
influences of those old school days at Cassel, 
before Bonn and the Bismarcks came to harden 
and pervert. 

Upon the heels of the Strasburg incident fol- 
lowed another flurry in international politics, 
which for the moment seemed almost as menacing, 
and which hurried forward a highly significant 
step on the part of William. 

The precipitate haste with which the young 
Kaiser had rushed off to visit St. Petersburg, 
almost before the public signs of mourning for his 
father had been removed in Berlin and Potsdam, 
had impressed everybody as curious. Nearly a 
year had now elapsed, and the failure of the Czar 
to say anything about returning the visit was 
growing to seem odder still. It was, of course 



i62 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

no secret that the Czar did not like William. No 
two men could present greater points of difference, 
physically and mentally. The autocrat of all the 
Russias is a huge, lumbering, slow, and tenacious 
man, growing somewhat fat with increasing years, 
hating all forms of regular exercise, and cherishing 
a veritable horror of noisy, overzealous, and bust- 
ling people. Every smart public servant in Russia 
is governed by the knowledge that his imperial 
master has a peculiar aversion to all forms of 
bother, and values his officials precisely in pro- 
portion as they make short and infrequent reports, 
free from all accounts of unpleasant things, and, 
still more important, from all meddlesome sugges- 
tions of reform. When a Russian diplomat was 
asked, a year ago, what the Czar's personal atti- 
tude toward William was, he answered expressively 
by shrugging his shoulders and putting his fingers 
in his ears. 

But now the Czar, from passively affronting 
William by not returning his visit, summoned the 
energy for a direct provocation. A palace luncheon 
was given in St. Petersburg, celebrating the be- 
trothal of a Montenegrin Princess to a Russian 
Grand Duke, and the Czar, standing and in a loud, 
clear voice, drank to Prince Nikolo of Montenegro 
as " the only sincere and faithful friend Russia 
had" among European sovereigns. That there 
might be no doubt about this, the Czar had 



A YEAR OF HELPFUL LESSONS. 163 

the words printed next day in the Official 
Messenger. 

Germany was not slow to comprehend the 
meaning of this remarkable speech. But to make 
it still clearer the Czarowitch, three weeks later, 
paid a formal visit to Stuttgart to attend some 
Court festivities, and passed through Berlin both 
going and coming— though the Breslau-Dresden 
route would have been more direct — apparently for 
no other purpose than to insult the Kaiser by 
stopping for an hour each time inside the railway 
station, as if there were no such people as the 
Hohenzollerns to so much as leave a card upon. 
As a capstone to this insolence, the Russian officers 
of his suite refused to drink the toast to the 
German Empire at the Stuttgart banquet, and, 
when a dispute arose, left the room in a body. 

The immediate effect of this was to remove the 
last vestige of reserve existing between William 
and his English relatives. He at once sent word 
that, if convenient, he would visit his grandmother, 
the Queen, at the beginning of August. An as- 
surance of hearty welcome was as promptly 
returned. 

This decision marked another stage in the decline 
of Bismarck's power. We have seen how he had 
been gradually pushed aside in the management 
of German internal affairs. Now the Kaiser was 
to break through the dearest traditions of Bis- 

II 



i64 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

marck's foreign policy — the cultivation of Russian 
amiability at whatever cost of dignity, and the 
contemptuous snubbing of England. With a fatal 
inabilit}^ to distinguish between the promptings 
of passion and the dictates of true policy, the 
Chancellor had been led into a position where he 
could maintain himself only if every one of the 
elements and chances combined to play his game 
for him, and keep William at daggers-drawn with 
all things English. The miracle did not happen. 
As we have seen, even the Czar took it into his head 
to interfere to the damage of Bismarck's plans. 

So the perplexed and baffled old Chancellor, 
noting with new rage and mortification how power 
was slipping from his hands, yet helpless to do 
other than fight doggedly to hold what yet re- 
mained, stopped behind in Berlin, the while Kaiser 
William steamed at the head of his splendid 
new squadron into Portsmouth Harbour, and the 
very sea shook with the thunderous cannon roar 
of his welcome. The world had never before seen 
such a show of fighting ships as was gathered 
before Cowes to greet him. There was one other 
thing which may be assumed to have been unique 
in human chronicles. William, in the exuberance 
of his delight at his really splendid reception, and 
at being created a British Admiral, issued a 
solemn imperial order making his grandmother 
a Colonel of Dragoons. 



A YEAR OF HELPFUL LESSONS, 165 

The English did well to surround the young 
Kaiser's visit with all imaginable pomp and dis- 
play of overwhelming naval force, for it meant 
very much more both to them and to him than any 
one is likely to have imagined at the time. The 
splendour of the material spectacle, and the senti- 
mental interest attaching to the fact that this 
young man coming to greet his grandmother was 
the first German Emperor to set foot on English 
soil since the days of the Crusaders, were much 
dwelt upon in the press. To us who have been 
striving to trace the inner workings of the in- 
fluences shaping the young man's character, the 
event has a nearer significance. It meant that 
William — having for years been estranged from 
the liberalizing English impulses and feelings of 
his boyish education ; having since his majority 
exulted in the false notion that to be truly German 
involved hatred of all things English — had come 
to see his mistake. 

It is not possible to exaggerate the importance 
of this visit, and of the causes leading up to it, 
upon William's mind. The Hohenzollerns, until 
within our own times the comparatively needy 
Princes of a poor country, have always been 
greatly impressed by the superior wealth and 
luxurious civilization of the English. The famous 
Double-Marriage project of Frederic William I's 
days was clung to in Berlin through years of 



i66 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

British snubs and rebuffs because thrifty Prussian 
eyes saw these islands through a golden mist. 
To the imagination of German royalty, English 
Princesses appear in the guise of fairies, not 
invariably beautiful, perhaps, but each bearing the 
purse of Fortunatus. This view of the English 
colours the thoughts of more lowly-born Germans^. 
"When Freytag^ seeks to explain the late Kaiser 
Frederic's complete and almost worshipping sub- 
jection to his wife, he says: " She had come to 
him from superior surroundings." 

William had tried hard, in his ultra-German 
days, to despise English wealth along with English 
political ideas. The theory of a Spartan severity, 
governing expenditure and all other conditions of 
daily life, was the keynote of his Teutonic period. 
But when he became Kaiser he had yielded to the 
temptation of getting the Reichstag to augment 
his annual civil list by 3,500,000 marks. That in 
itself considerably modified his austere hatred of 
luxury. Now, as the guest of the richest nation 
in the world, he was able to feel himself a relative, 
and wholly at home. The English conquest of 
William was complete. 

No hint of unfilial conduct had been heard, now, 
for a long time, nor was henceforth to be heard. 
William had by this time become fully reconciled 

* " The Crown Prince and the German Imperial Crownj" 
p. 49. 



A YEAR OF HELPFUL LESSONS. 167 

to his mother, and in the following month, 
September of 1889, he purchased for and presented 
to her the Villa Reiss, a delightful summer chateau 
in the Taunus Mountains. 

Thereafter a strong sympathy with England has 
manifested itself in all his actions. The Czar 
did at last, in the most frosty, formal manner, 
pay a brief visit to Berlin, and William the follow- 
ing year returned the courtesy by attending the 
Russian manoeuvres, but this has not at all 
affected his open preference for English friendship. 
He always spoke German with an English accent 
— which now is more marked than ever. 

He has a bewildering variety of uniforms, but 
the one which affords him the greatest pride is the 
dress of the British Admiral. He wears it when- 
ever the least excuse offers. Upon his journey to 
Athens in October of 1889, to attend the wedding 
of his sister and the Greek Crown Prince, he was 
so much affected by his new English naval title 
that when he steamed into the classic ^gean Sea 
on his imperial yacht he flew the British Admiral's 
flag from her top. A British fleet was also there 
to participate in the ceremonies, and William 
took his new position so seriously, and had such 
delight in descending suddenly upon the squadron 
at unexpected and unreasonable hours, and routing 
everybody out for parade and inspection, that the 
British oflicers themselves revolted and preferred 



1 68 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

an informal complaint to the British Minister. 
" This thing is played out," they said. ** If he 
would merely wear the uniform and let it end with 
that, we shouldn't mind. But we didn't make him 
Admiral to worry the lives out of us in this 
fashion.** 



CHAPTER X. 

THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. 

We have come now to a time when the effects 
of this reasserted EngHsh influence began to be 
apparent throughout Germany. Since his success- 
ful tour through the Westphah'an strike district, 
Dr. Hinzpeter had been visibly growing in men's 
eyes as the new power behind the throne. Another 
friend of William's, Count William Douglas, began 
also to attract attention. This nobleman, ten 
years older than the Kaiser, and a capable writer 
and speaker as well as soldier is a descendant of 
one of the numerous Scotch cadets of aristocratic 
families who carried their swords into Continental 
service when the Stuarts were driven from the 
British throne. Both in appearance and tempera- 
ment no one could be more wholly German than 
Count Douglas is, but his intimacy with William 
only became marked after the English visit. 



I70 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

Immediately upon his return from England, 
William delivered a speech at Miinster in which 
he eulogized Hinzpeter as a representative West- 
phalian, whose splendid principles he had imbibed 
in his boyhood. During the ensuing autumn and 
winter the presence of Dr. Hinzpeter at the 
palace became so much a matter of comment that 
some of Bismarck's ''reptile" papers began to 
complain that if the Westphalian was to exert 
such power he ought to take office so that he could 
be openly discussed. 

Similar attacks were made by the Chancellor's 
organs upon Count Douglas, who had written a 
very complimentary pamphlet about the young 
Kaiser shortly after his accession, and who now, 
as an Independent Conservative, was thought to 
reflect the Kaiser's own political preferences. 
Public opinion bracketed Hinzpeter and Douglas 
together as the active forces at the head of the 
Waldersee coalition, and we shall see that William 
himself treated them as such when the time for 
action came. 

New men had gradually supplanted old ones in 
many important official posts. The gentlest of 
soft hints had long since (in August of 1888) been 
borne in by a little bird to the aged Count von 
Moltke, and he, on the instant, with the perfect 
dignity and pure gentility of his nature, had re- 
sponded with a request to be permitted to retire 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. 171 

from active labour. His letter, with its quaintly 
pathetic explanation that " I am no longer able to 
mount a horse," was answered with effusion by 
William, who visited him personally at his resi- 
dence, and made him President of the National 
Defence Commission, vice the Emperor Frederic, 
deceased. Later events rendered it natural to 
contrast the loyal behaviour of the great soldier 
with the mutinous and perverse conduct of the 
statesman whose name is popularly linked with 
his, and during the last year of his life Moltke 
existed in a veritable apotheosis of demonstrative 
imperial affection, which indeed followed his coffin 
to the grave with such symbols of royal favour as 
no commoner's bier had ever before borne in 
Germany. 

Somewhat later the Minister of Marine, General 
von Caprivi, received a delicate intimation that the 
Kaiser thought a soldier was out of place in charge 
of the navy, and he also promptly but gracefully re- 
signed, and accepted the command of an army corps 
instead with cheerful obedience. It is a great gift 
to know when and how to get out, and Caprivi did 
it so amiably and intelligently that the Kaiser 
made a mental note of him as a good man to rely 
upon when the time should come. 

General Bronsart von Schellendorf similarly re- 
signed the War Ministry. He was a descendant 
of one of the lar^^^e colony of Huguenot famihes 



172 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

which took refuge in Berlin after the revocation of 
the Edict of Nantes — and it was a strange freak 
of Fate's irony which, in 1871, sent him as Colonel 
out from the German headquarters before Sedan 
to convey a demand for surrender to the French 
Emperor. Curiously enough he was succeeded now 
as Minister of War by another descendant of these 
exiled French Protestants, General von Verdy du 
Vernois, the ablest military writer of his genera- 
tion, a notably clever organizer and a deservedly 
popular man. 

Neither von Verdy norWaldersee,who succeeded 
to Moltke's proud position as Chief of the General 
Staff, remained long in their new posts. The 
world had nothing but vague surmises as to the 
causes of their retirement, and, noting that they 
still retain the friendly regard of their sovereign, 
did not dally long with these. Here again the con- 
trast forces itself upon public attention, for these 
two good soldiers and able administrators neither 
sought interviews with travelling correspondents in 
which to vent their grievances, nor inspired spite- 
ful attacks in provincial newspapers against their 
young chief. They went loyally out of office, as 
they had entered it, and kept their silence. 

Thus throughout the public service, civil and 
military alike, these changes went forward — the 
greybeards who had helped to create the Empire 
on the field or in the council-room, one by one 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. 173 

stepping down and out to make room for the new 
generation — but Bismarck, though becoming more 
and more isolated, clung resolutely to his place. 
It was no secret to him that the Kaiser^s prin- 
cipal advisers and friends were keen to throw him 
out of the Chancellorship ; it must have long been 
apparent to him that the Kaiser was accustoming 
his mind to thoughts of a Berlin without Bismarck. 
But the Iron Chancellor had neither the simple 
dignity of Moltke nor the shrewd suavity of 
Caprivi. He would not leave until he had been 
violently thrust forth, and even then he would 
stand on the doorstep and shout. 

The opponents of Bismarck had long been 
gathering their forces for a grand attack. Their 
difficulty had been the unwillingness of the Kaiser 
definitely to give his assent to the overthrow of 
the great man. Often, in moments of impatience 
at the autocratic airs assumed by Bismarck and 
his son, William had seemed on the point of 
turning down his thumb as a signal for slaughter. 
But there always would come a realization of how 
mighty a figure in German history Bismarck truly 
was — and perhaps, too, some modified reassertion 
of the tremendous personal influence with which 
for years the Chancellor had magnetized him. 
Almost to the end the young man had recurring 
spasms of subjection to this old ideal of his youth. 
Even while he was sporting his British ensign in 



S74 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

Greek waters, and showing to the whole world how 
completely the breach between him and English 
royalty had been healed, he salved his conscience, 
as it were, by addressing enthusiastic and affec- 
tionate despatches to Bismarck from every new 
stopping-place on those classic shores. 

But now, in January of 1890, the long-looked-for 
opportunity came. The natural term of the Reich- 
stag elected in 1887 — the last one chosen for only 
three years* service — was on the point of expira- 
tion. The anti-Socialist penal laws would lapse 
in September of 1890 unless renewed either by 
this dying Reichstag or, without delay, by its 
successor. Prince Bismarck was, of course, com- 
mitted to their prompt and emphatic renewal. 
His enemies— another term for William's new 
friends — had secretly been preparing for the defeat 
of these laws in the Reichstag, and now, in the 
middle of the month, found that they had secured 
an absolute majority. They conveyed this fact to 
the Kaiser, with the obvious corollary that the 
time had arrived for him to take the popular lead 
in his Empire, and make an issue on this question 
with his Chancellor. William saw the point, and 
reluctantly took the decisive step. 

Space permits only the most cursory glance at 
this parliamentary battlefield, whereon Bismarck 
had waged so many rough Berserker fights, and 
which now was to see his complete annihilation. 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. 175 

The Reichstag at Berlin is by no means power- 
ful in the sense that Parliament is in London or 
Congress in Washington. It is a convention of 
spectacled professors, country nobles, and pro- 
fessional men desirous of advertisement or the 
pretence of employment, with a sprinkling of 
smart financiers and professional politicians who 
have personal ends to serve. They play at legisla- 
tion — some seriously, others not — but as a rule what 
they do and say makes next to no difference what- 
ever. They have not even the power of initiating 
legislation. That function belongs to the Bundes- 
rath or Federal Council, which means the Prussian 
Ministry, which in turn meant Bismarck. His 
historic conception of law-making was to combine 
by bribes and threats a sufficient number of the 
fragmentary parties to constitute a majority, and 
to use this to pass his measures as far as it would 
go. Then he would swing around, create a different 
majority out of other groups, and carry forward 
another line of legislation. In turn he had been 
at the head of every important political faction 
and the enemy of each, and if he was unable to 
get his way through one combination always man- 
aged sooner or later to obtain it by a new shaking- 
up of the dice. 

Parliamentary institutions were not always at 
this low estate in Prussia. Three hundred years 
ago the Brandenburg Diet was a strong and in- 



176 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

fluential body, which stoutly held the purse- 
strings and gave the law to sovereigns. The 
Hohenzollerns broke it down, first by establish- 
ing and fostering Stdnde, or small local diets, to 
dispute its power and jurisdiction, and then, in 
1652, by the Great Elector boldly putting his 
mailed heel on it as a nuisance. It still Hngered 
on in a formal, colourless, ineffective fashion until 
in the time of Frederic William I, when it was 
contemptuously kicked out of sight. That stal- 
wart despot explained this parting kick by saying: 
" I am establishing the King's sovereignty like a 
rock of bronze ; " and, whatever its composition, 
there the rock stood indubitably in all men's sight 
for much more than a century, with neither par- 
liaments to shake its foundations nor powerful 
ministers to crumble away its sides. 

Bismarck had made it a condition of his accep- 
tance of office in 1862 that he would govern 
Prussia without a Parliament. When the fortune 
of war and the federation of the states enlarged 
the scope of his responsibilities to the limits of 
the new Empire, he proceeded upon the same 
autocratic lines. There was a greater necessity, 
it is true, of pretending to defer to the parlia- 
mentary idea, but he never dissembled his disgust 
at this necessity. He bullied the leaders of the 
opposition factions with such open coarseness, 
imputing evil and dishonest motives, introducing 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. 177 

details of personal life which his spies had 
gathered, and using all the great powers at his 
command to insult and injure, that a large pro- 
portion of the educated and refined gentlemen of 
Germany, who should have been its natural 
political leaders, either declined to enter the 
Reichstag at all, or withdrew, disheartened and 
humiliated, after a brief term of service. All 
this reflected, and brought down in embodied 
form into our own times, the traditional attitude 
of the Hohenzollerns toward the poor thing called 
a Parliament. 

It was therefore very much of an anachronism 
to find, in the year of grace 1890, a Prussian 
King invoking the aid of a Parliament to help him 
encompass the overthrow of his Prime Minister. 

The situation on January 20th, briefly stated, was 
this : The Reichstag, consisting of 397 members, 
had been governed by Bismarck's ** Cartel " com- 
bination of 94 National Liberals, 78 Conserva- 
tives, and 37 Imperialists, a clear majority of 21. 
The efforts of the Waldersee party, however, had 
honeycombed this majority with disaffection, and 
the National Liberals had been induced to agree 
that they would not vote for a renewal of the 
clause giving the Government power to expel 
obnoxious citizens. On the other hand, the 
Conservatives promised not to vote for the re- 
newal of the anti-Socialist law at all unless it 



178 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

contained the expulsion clause. Thus, of course, 
the measure was bound to fall between two 
stools. This apparent clashing of cross purposes 
might have been stopped in ten minutes if it had 
proceeded spontaneously from the two factions 
themselves. But everybody knew that it had 
been carefully arranged from above, and that the 
leader of each party had had an interview with 
the Kaiser. This affectation of irreconcilable 
views on the expulsion clause, therefore, deceived 
no one — least of all Prince Bismarck. He osten- 
tatiously remained at Friedrichsruh until the very 
last day of the Reichstag ; then, indeed, he 
arrived in Berlin, but did not deign to show 
himself at either the Chamber or the Schloss. 

The National Liberals voted down the expul- 
sion clause on January 23rd. Then the Conserva- 
tives, two days later, joined the Clerical, Freisin- 
nigey and Socialist Parties in throwing out the 
whole measure. Thereupon the dissolution of 
the Reichstag was immediately announced, and 
the members proceeded to the Schloss to receive 
their formal dismissal from the Kaiser. William 
spoke somewhat more nervously than usual, but 
was extremely cordial in his manner. He praised 
the labours of the Reichstag, dwelt upon his de- 
sires to improve the condition of the working 
classes, and said never a word about the defeated 
Socialist laws. Everybody felt that th^ imperial 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. 179 

reticence and the absence of Bismarck portended 
big events. 

Next week came the first overt movement in 
the struggle which all Germany now realized that 
Bismarck was waging for political life itself. He 
resigned his minor post as Prussian Minister of 
Commerce, and the place was promptly filled by 
the appointment of Baron Berlepsch. This selec- 
tion was felt to be symbolical — because Berlepsch 
had been Governor of the Rhineland during the 
strikes, and had managed to preserve order with- 
out recourse to violence, and to gain the liking of 
the working men. To make the meaning of this 
promotion more clear, the Governor of West- 
phalia, who had rushed to declare his province 
in a state of siege when the strike broke out, and 
had called in soldiers to overawe the miners, was 
now curtly dismissed from office. 

All this signified that the Hinzpeter propaganda 
of Christian Socialism had at last definitely cap- 
tured the young Kaiser. Once enlisted, he threw 
himself with characteristic vehemence of energy 
into the movement. Events now crowded on each 
other's heels. 

On February 4th William issued his famous brace 
of rescripts to Bismarck and to the Minister of 
Commerce, reciting the woes and perils of German 
industrial classes, and ordaining negotiations with 
certain European States for a Labour Conference, 

I? 



i8o THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

" with a view to coming to an understanding 
about the possibility of complying with the needs 
and desires of labourers, as manifested by them 
during the strikes of the last few years and other- 
wise." "I am resolved," wrote the Emperor, **to 
lend my hand toward bettering the condition of 
German working men as far as my solicitude for 
their welfare is reconcilable with the necessity of 
enabling German industry to retain its power 
of competing in the world's market, and thus 
securing its own existence and that of its 
labourers. The dwindling of our native indus- 
tries through any such loss of their foreign 
markets would deprive not only the masters, but 
the men, of their bread. . . . The difficulties in 
the way of improving our working men's condi- 
tion have their origin in the stress of international 
competition, and are only to be surmounted, or 
lesvsened, by international agreement between 
those countries which dominate the world's 
market." Hence he had decided upon summon- 
ing an International Labour Conference. 

On the evening of the day on which William 
thus astonished Germany and Europe, he was the 
principal guest at a dinner given by Bismarck in 
his palatial residence in the Wilhelmstrasse, and 
it was noted that he took special pleasure in 
talking with Dr. Miquel, Chief Burgomaster of 
Frankfort, to whoni he spoke with ^eal and ^t 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. i8i 

length upon his desire to promote the welfare and 
protect the natural rights of the labouring classes. 
Court gossip was swift to mark Miquel as a 
coming man, and to draw deductions of its own 
from the story that Bismarck had, even as the 
host of an emperor, seemed preoccupied and de- 
pressed. 

A fortnight of unexampled uncertainty, of con- 
tradictory guesses and paradoxical rumours, now 
kept Berlin, and all Germany for that matter, in 
anxious suspense. That Bismarck had been con- 
fronted with a crisis was evident enough. Day 
after day he was seen to be holding prolonged 
conferences with the young Emperor, and the 
wildest surmises as to the character of these 
interviews obtained currency. There were stories 
of stormy scenes, of excited imperial dictation and 
angry ministerial resistance, which had no value 
whatever as contributions to the sum of popular 
information, but which were everywhere eagerly 
discussed. The weight of Berlin opinion inclined 
toward the theory that Bismarck would in the 
end submit. He had never in his life shown 
any disposition to make sacrifices for political 
consistency, and it was assumed that, once his 
personal objections were overcome, he would not 
at all mind adapting his political position to the 
new order of things. This view was, of course, 
based upon the idea that the Kaiser really desired 



1 82 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

to retain Bismarck in office ; the loosest German 
imagination did not conceive the actual truth : to 
wit, that the Chancellor's retirement had been 
decided upon, and was the one end at which all 
these mystifying moves and counter-moves aimed. 

The preparations for the Conference went on, 
meanwhile. A new Council of State for Prussia 
was founded, to have charge of the general social 
and fiscal reforms contemplated. The public noted 
that chief among the names gazetted were those 
of Dr. Hinzpeter and Count Douglas, and these 
were given such associates as Herr Krupp, of 
Essen ; Prince Pless, a great Silesian mine- 
owner ; Baron von Stumm, another large em- 
ployer ; and Baron von Hune, a leading Catholic 
and important landed proprietor. These were 
new strong names, altogether out of the old 
Bismarckian official rut, and their significance 
was emphasized by the Emperor's selection of 
Dr. Miquel as reporter of the Council. People 
recognized that events were being shaped at last 
from the royal palace instead of the Chancellery. 

In the very middle of this period of political 
suspense came the elections for the new Reichs- 
tag. Never before had Germany seen such a 
lamb-like and sweet-tempered electoral campaign. 
Three years before Bismarck had Hterally moved 
heaven and earth to wrest a majority from the 
ballot-boxes, for he had induced the Vatican to 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. 183 

formally recommend his nominees to Catholic 
voters, and had gone far beyond the bounds of 
diplomatic safety in his famous " sturmund drang " 
speech, threatening nothing less than war if a hos- 
tile Reichstag should be elected. But this time 
he preserved an obstinate and ominous silence. 
Nothing could tempt him to say a v^ord in 
favour of any candidate. 

Under the double influence of the Kaiser's 
enthusiastic new Socialism and the Chancellor's 
grim seclusion, the German electorate knocked 
the old "Cartel" parties into splinters. The poll- 
ing results amazed everybody. Of the " Cartel " 
factions, the National Liberals fell from 94 to 39, 
the Conservatives from 78 to 66, and the Im- 
perialists from 37 to 20. On the other hand, 
the Freisinnigen rose from 35 to 80, and the 
Socialists from 11 to 37. Equally interesting 
was the fact that for the first time the German 
imperial idea had made an impression on the 
Alsacian mind, and from sending a solid dele- 
gation of 15 dissentients, the two conquered 
provinces now elected 5 who accepted the situa- 
tion. 

Allusion has heretofore been made to Bis- 
marck's recent declaration that the Kaiser took 
up the whole Social-reform policy solely as a 
political dodge. If we could accept this theory, 
it would be of distinct interest to know what 



i84 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

William thought of his bargain, after the returns 
were all in. The stupendous triumph of the 
dreaded Socialists and hated Freisinnigen must 
have indeed been a bitter mouthful to the proud 
young Hohenzollern. But he swallowed it man- 
fully, and the results have been the reverse of 
harmful. No parliamentary session of the year, 
anywhere in the world, was more businesslike, 
dignified, and patriotic than that of the new 
Reichstag at Berlin. 

But at the outset this political earthquake threw 
William into a great state of excitement. One 
might almost say that the electrical disturbances 
which ushered in the convulsion affected the 
young man's mind, for he did perhaps his most 
eccentric action on election day. While the voters 
of Berlin were going to the polls at noon, on this 
20th of February, the Kaiser suddenly ** alarmed" 
the entire garrison of the capital, and sent the 
whole surprised force, cavalry, artillery, baggage 
trains and foot, rattling and scurrying through 
the streets of the capital at their utmost speed. 
It turned out to be nothing more serious than an 
abrupt freak of the Kaiser to utilize the fine 
weather for a drill on the Tempelhof. At least 
that was the explanation given : but the spectacle 
produced a sinister impression at the time, and 
there are still those who believe it to have been 
intended to influence and overawe the voters. 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. 185 

No doubt consciousness of the gravity of the 
quarrel with Bismarck, which the Kaiser and his 
new friends saw now must come swiftly to a point, 
contributed with the unexpected election results 
to temporarily unsettle William's nerves. For a 
week or so, during this momentous period, there 
were actual fears lest his mental balance should 
break down under the strain. Fortunately the 
excited tension relaxed itself in good time, and 
there has since been no recurrence of the symptoms 
which then caused genuine alarm. 

It was at the culmination of this unsettled period 
that William made his celebrated speech to the 
Brandenburg Diet. The occasion was the session 
dinner, March 5th, and those present noted that 
the Kaiser's manner was unwontedly distrait and 
abstracted. His words curiously reflected his 
mood — half poetic, half pugilistic. He began by 
a tender reference to the way in which the 
Brandenburgers had through evil and joyous days 
alike stood at the back of the Hohenzollerns. 
With a gloomy sigh he added : " It is in the hour 
of need that one comes to know his true friends." 
After an abrupt reference to a joke which had 
recently been made about him as the reisendej or 
Travelling, Kaiser, and a pedagogic injunction to 
his hearers to by all means travel as much in 
foreign lands as they could, he drifted into a lofty 
and beautiful description of the spiritualizing 



i86 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

effects his recent sea voyages had had upon him. 
Standing alone on the great deck at night, he 
said, communing with the vast starry firmament, 
he had been able to look beyond politics and to 
realize the magnitude and tremendous respon- 
sibilities of the position he held. He had returned 
with a new and more exalted resolve to rule merci- 
fully and well under God's providence, and to 
benefit all his people. Then there came a sudden 
anti-climax to this graceful and captivating rhe- 
toric. " All who will assist me in my great task," 
he called out, throwing a lion's glance over the 
tables, ** I shall heartily welcome ; but those who 
attempt to oppose me I will dash to pieces 1 " 

The reporters were so frightened at these 
menacing words that they toned them down in 
their accounts of the speech ; but the Kaiser with 
his own hand restored the original expression in 
the report of the official Reichsanzeiger. Naturally 
the phrase created a painful sensation throughout 
Germany. Everybody leaped to the conclusion 
that the threat was levelled at the Socialist and 
Radical leaders in particular, and the new 
Reichstag in general. But within a fortnight the 
astonished world learned that it was Bismarck 
who was to be dashed to pieces. 

The time has not yet arrived for a detailed 
account of the circumstances surrounding 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. 187 

Bismarck's actual fall. We have been able to 
trace clearly enough the progression of causes and 
changes which led up to that fall. Of the event 
itself a great deal has been printed, but extremely 
little is known. The reason for this is simple. 
The Kaiser and his present friends are possessed 
with the rigid Prussian military sense of the duty 
of absolute silence about official secrets. Prince 
Bismarck has insisted vehemently upon the neces- 
sity of this quality in other people, yet has not 
always distinguished himself by respecting its 
demands. In his surprising latter-day garrulity, 
it is easy to believe that he would tell the story 
about which the others preserve so strict a reti- 
cence, if it were not that the story involves his own 
cruel personal humiliation. 

Throughout the trying crisis William never lost 
sight of the proud and historic reputation of the 
man with whom he had to deal, or of the great 
personal reverence and affection which he, as a 
young King, owed to this giant among European 
statesmen, this most illustrious of the servants of 
his dynasty, this true creator of the new German 
Empire. Every step of the Emperor during the 
whole affair is marked with delicate courtesy and 
the most painstaking anxiety to avoid giving the 
doomed Chancellor unnecessary pain. Although 
it was entirely settled in the more intimate palace 
counsels at the end of 1889 that the Prince was 



1 88 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

to be retired from office, William sent him the 
following New Year's greeting, than which 
nothing could be more cordial or kindly : 

" In view of the impending change from one year to another, I send you, dear 
Prince, my heartiest and warmest congratulations. I look back on the expiring 
year, in which it was vouchsafed to us not only to preserve to our dear Father- 
land external peace, but also to strengthen the pledges of its maintenance, 
with sincere gratitude to God. It is to me also a matter for deep satisfaction 
that, with the trusty aid of the Reichstag, we have secured the law establishing 
old age and indigence assurance, and thus talcen a considerable forward step 
toward the realization of that solicitude for the welfare of the working classes 
which I have so wholly at heart. I know well how large a share of this success 
is due to your self-sacrificing and creative energy, and i pray God that He may 
for many more years grant me the benefit of your approved and trusted counsej 
in my difficult and responsible post as ruler. 

** WiLHELM. 

"Berlin, Dec. 31, 1889." 

A few days later came the death of the venerable 
Empress Augusta, and William wrote again to 
Bismarck at Friedrichsruh, affectionately enjoining 
him not to endanger his health by trying to make 
the winter journey to Berlin for the funeral. 

This friendly attitude was, to the Kaiser's mind, 
entirely compatible with the decision that a new 
Chancellor was needed to carry on the enlightened 
programme of the new reign. But Bismarck 
stubbornly refused to recognize this. When his 
obstinacy made peremptory measures necessary, 
he had even the bad taste to instance these recent 
amiable messages as proofs of the duplicity with 
which he had been treated. 

The best authenticated story in Berlin, of all 
the legion grown up about this historic episode, is 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS, 189 

to the effect that one afternoon, in the course of 
an interview between Kaiser and Chancellor on 
the approaching Labour Conference, Bismarck was 
incautious enough to use the old familiar threat of 
resignation with which he had been wont to terrify 
and subdue the first Kaiser. Young William 
said nothing, but two or three hours later an 
imperial aide-de-camp appeared at the Foreign 
Office in Wilhelmstrasse with the statement that 
he had come for that resignation. Bismarck, 
flushed and shaken, sent an evasive reply. The 
aide-de-camp came again, with a reiterated demand. 
Bismarck stammered out that he had not had the 
time to write it as yet, but that he would himself 
wait upon the Emperor with it the next day. He 
made this visit to the Schloss, prepared to urge 
with all the powers at his command, in the 
stress of a personal appeal, that the demand be 
reconsidered. But at the palace he was met 
with that equivalent for the housemaid's trans- 
parent '* Not at home " which is used in the halls 
of kings ; and on his return to Wilhelmstrasse he 
found the inexorable aide-de-camp once more 
waiting for the resignation. Then only, in bitter 
mortification and wrath, did Bismarck write out 
his own official death-warrant, which a few days 
later was to be followed by his son Herbert's 
resignation. 
The widely circulated report that, in his ex- 



I90 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

tremity, the Chancellor appealed for aid to the 
Empress Frederic, seems to be apocryphal. It is 
certain, however, that he did, during the twenty-four 
hours in which that stolidly-waiting aide-de-camp 
darkened his life, make strenous efforts in other 
almost equally unlikely and hostile quarters to 
save himself. They availed nothing save to re- 
veal in some dim fashion to his racked and des- 
pairing mind how deeply and implacably he was 
hated by the officials and magnates all about him. 
But to the general public, astonished and be- 
wildered at this sudden necessity to imagine a 
Germany without Bismarck, the glamour about 
his name was still dazzling. When it came their 
turn to act, they made the fallen Chancellor's de- 
parture from Berlin a great popular demonstration. 
It is well that they did so. With all his faults, 
Bismarck was the chief German of his generation, 
and the spectacle of cold-blooded desertion which 
the official and journalistic classes of Berlin pre- 
sented in their attitude toward him upon the 
instant of his tumble, offended human nature. 
Nothing could be more true than that he himself 
was responsible for this attitude. It was the only 
possible harvest to be expected from his sowing. 
He had done his best to make all preferment and 
power in Germany depend upon callous treachery 
and the calculation of self-interest. He had con- 
temptuously thrust ideals and generous aspirations 



THE FALL OF THE BISMARCKS. 191 

out of the domain of practical politics. He had 
systematically accustomed the German mind to 
the rule of force and cunning, to the savage 
crushing of political opponents, and the shame- 
less use of slander and scandal as political 
weapons. That this official mind of his own 
moulding, inured to sacrificial horrors, familiar 
with the spectacle of statesmen destroyed and 
eminent politicians flung headlong from the " rock 
of bronze," should have viewed his own prodigious 
downward crash without pity, was not at all 
unnatural. But for the credit of Germany with 
the outside world it is fortunate that the Berliners, 
as a whole, responded to the pathetic side of the 
episode. 

WiUiam's emotional nature was peculiarly stirred 
by the separation, when it finally came. The 
Reichsanzeiger of March 20th— two days after the 
final act in the comedy of the unresigned resigna- 
tion—contained the imperial message granting 
Prince Bismarck permission to retire. The phrase- 
ology of the document was excessively eulogistic 
of the passing statesman, and no hint of differing 
opinions was allowed to appear. Bismarck was 
created Duke of Lauenburg, and given the rank 
of a Field Marshal. 

More eloquent by far, however, than any rhe- 
torical professions of grief in his public proclama- 
tions, were the Emperor's statements to personal 



192 7 HE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

friends of the distress he suffered at seeing Bis- 
marck depart. The ordeal was rendered none the 
less painful by the fact that it had been foreseen 
for months, or by the consideration that it was 
really unavoidable. On the 22nd William wrote 
to an intimate, in response to a message of sym- 
pathy : 



" Many thanl<s for your kindly letter. I have, indeed, gone through bitter 
experiences, and have passed many painful hours. My heart is as sorrowful as if 
I had again lost my grandfather. But it is so ordered for me by God, and it 
must be borne, even if I should sink under the burden. The post of officer of the 
watch on the Ship of State has devolved upon me. Her course remains the same. 
So now full steam ahead 1 '' 



CHAPTER XI. 

A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK. 

The first and most obvious thing to be said of 
the twelvemonth during v^hich the Ship of State 
has sailed with no Bismarck at the helm, is that 
the course has been one of novel smoothness. 
Since the foundation of the Empire Germany has 
not known such another tranquil and comfortable 
period. Nothing has arisen calculated to make 
men regret the ex-Chancellor's retirement. Almost 
every month has contributed some new warrant 
for the now practically unanimous sense of satis- 
faction in his being out of office. When astounded 
Germany first grasped the fact of his downfall, 
even those whose hatred of him was most im- 
placable could not dissemble their nervousness 
lest Germany should be the sufferer in some way 
by it. He had so persistently kept before the 



194 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

mind of the nation that they were surrounded by 
vindictive armed enemies ; he had year after year 
so industriously beaten the war drum and predicted 
the speedy breaking of the storm-clouds if his own 
way were denied him ; he had so accustomed 
everybody to the idea that he was personally 
responsible for the continued existence from day 
to day of the German Empire, the peace of 
Europe, and almost every other desirable thing, 
that the mere thought of what would happen now 
he was actually gone dazed and terrified the public 
mind. 

But lo ! nothing whatever happened. The 
world continued its placid sweep through space 
without the sign of an interruption. The spring sun 
rose in the marshes of the Vistula and set behind 
the fir-clad ridges of the Vosges, just the same as 
ever. When Germany recovered her breath after 
the shock, it was to discover that respiration was 
an easier matter than it had formerly been. It 
was really a weight which had been lifted from 
the national breast. The sensation gradually took 
form as one of great relief, akin to that of filling 
the lungs to their utmost with the cool morning 
air after a night of confinement, unrest, and a 
tainted atmosphere. It is too much to say that 
apprehension fled at once; the anxious habit of 
mind still exists in Germany, and, indeed, must 
continue to exist so long as France and Russia 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK, 195 

stand on the map where they do. But a very 
short space of time served to make clear that 
Germany was in adroit and capable hands, and 
that the old-time notion of the impossibility of 
supporting national life without Bismarck had 
been the most childish of chimeras. Then little 
by little the new civility, freedom, and absence of 
friction which began to mark Parliamentary de- 
bates and official administration, attracted notice. 
The spectacle of a Chancellor who actually as- 
sumed the patriotism and personal honour of his 
political opponents in the Reichstag, who spoke 
to them like reasonable beings, and who said their 
views and criticisms would always receive his 
respectful consideration, was not lost upon the 
German brain. People found themselves, before 
long, actively liking the new regime. 

In reaching this attitude they were greatly 
helped by Bismarck's own behaviour, after he 
retired to Friedrichsruh. It does not fall within 
the purpose of this work to dwell upon the 
unhappy way in which, during the year, this 
statesman who was so great has laboured to 
belittle himself in the eyes of the world. Allusion 
to it is made here only to append the note that 
the Kaiser, under extreme provocation, has stead- 
fastly declined to sanction the slightest movement 
toward reprisals. Although Bismarck has per- 
mitted himself to affront authority much more 

13 



196 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

openly and seriously than Count Harry von Arnim 
ever did, his threats, his revelations, and his in- 
citements to schism have all been treated with 
serene indifference. And so, too, we may pass 
them by, and push on to greater matters. 

On May 6th the new Reichstag was opened 
by a speech from the throne, almost exclusively 
reflecting the Emperor's absorption in schemes 
of social reform and progress, and the new 
Chancellor, Caprivi, laid before Parliament a 
Trades Law Amendment Act, as a first attempt 
at embodying these schemes. After a year of 
deliberation this measure has just been passed, 
and, unless the Federal Council interposes some 
wholly unlooked-for obstacles, will come into effect 
on April i, 1892. By this law Sunday labour 
is absolutely forbidden in all industries, save a 
selected few connected with entertainment and 
travelling, and the integrity of the great Church 
festival holidays is also secured. The Federal 
Council is given the power to supervise and con- 
trol the maximum hours of labour in such trades 
as endanger the health of workmen by overwork. 
Both journeymen and apprentices are to be able 
to bring suit against their employers for wrongful 
dismissal. Female labour is forbidden at night, 
and is given at all times a maximum of eleven 
hours. Careful restrictions are also placed upon 
juvenile labour, and after April of 1894 children 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK. 197 

under the age of thirteen are not to be employed 
at all in factories. These reforms, which prac- 
tically embody the recommendations of the Labour 
Conference, do little more than bring Germany 
abreast of England and America. A more ex- 
tended programme of social reform is promised 
when the Reichstag meets again next November. 

But it is not on specific achievements that the 
tremendous popularity which William has won 
for himself during the past year is founded. We 
are by no means within view of the end of the 
game, but it is already apparent that his greatest 
strength lies in the certainty and sureness of touch 
with which he appeals to the inborn German liking 
for lofty and noble visions of actions. The possi- 
bility — probability if you like — that these visions 
will never get themselves materialized, is not so 
important as it seems. Socialism in Germany is 
far more a matter of imagination than of fact. Mr. 
Baring-Gould quotes an observer of the election 
phenomena of 1S78, to show that "decorous people, 
dressed in an unexceptionable manner, and even to 
some extent wearing kid-gloves," went to the polls 
as Socialists then. This has been still more true 
of later elections. The element of imaginative 
men who had themselves little or nothing to 
complain of, but who dreamed of a vague Social 
Democracy as an idealized refuge from the harsh, 
dry bureaucracy and brutal militarism of Bis- 



198 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

marck's government, pla3^ed a large and larger 
part in each successive augmentation of the 
Socialists' voting strength. For want of a better 
word we may say that William is a dreamer too. 
In place of their amorphous Utopia, he throws 
upon the canvas before the Socialists the splendid 
fantasy of a beneficent absolutism which shall be 
also a democracy, in which everybody shall be 
good to everybody else, and all shall sleep soundly 
every night, rocked in the consciousness that their 
Kaiser is looking out for them, to see justice done 
in every corner, and happiness the law of the land. 

It is all fantastic, no doubt, but it is generous 
and elevated and inspiring. Granted the premises 
of government by dreams, it is a much better dream 
than any which flames in the weak brains of the 
miners at Fourmies or in the dwarfed skulls of the 
Berlin slums. And the Germany which, under 
the impulse of a chivalrous and ardent young 
leader, finds itself thrilled now by this apocalyptic 
picture of ideals realized, and of government by 
the best that is in men instead of the worst, is 
certainly a much pleasanter subject for contem- 
plation than that recent Germany which, under 
Bismarck, sneered at every spiritualizing ambition 
or thought, and roughly thrust its visionaries into 
prison or exile. 

The chronological record of what remained of 
1890 is meagre enough. Caprivi's first quarter in 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK. 199 

office was rendered brilliant by the bargain which 
gave Heligoland to Germany, and discussion over 
this notable piece of fortune was prolonged until 
the idleness of the summer solstice withdrew 
men's minds from politics. William made visits 
to Scandinavia, first of all, and then to the south 
shore of England, to Russia, and to Austria. In 
November the excitement over Dr. Koch's alleged 
specific for tuberculosis was promptly reflected by 
the Emperor's interest. He gave personal audi- 
ence to the eminent microscopist, saying that he 
felt it his duty to buy the wonderful invention 
and confer the benefit of it freely upon not only 
his own people but the world at large. A fort- 
night later he bestowed upon Dr. Koch the order 
of the Red Eagle of the first class — a novel in- 
novation upon the rule that there must be regular 
progression in the inferior degrees of the order. 

In the same month William accepted the resig- 
nation of Court Chaplain Stoecker, and met Dr. 
Windhorst in conversation for the first time. The 
two events are bracketed thus because they have 
an interesting bearing upon the altered state of 
the religious question in Germany. 

The KuUurkampf had already, as we have seen, 
dwindled greatly under the parliamentary necessities 
of Bismarck's last years in power. But there had 
been no reconciliation, and the unjust old quarrel 
still drew a malignant gash of division through 



200 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

the political and social relations of the German 
people. Anti-Semitism in the same way lingered 
on, powerless for much overt mischief, but serving 
to keep alive the miserable race dissensions which 
have wrought such harm in Germany, and lending 
the apparent sanction of the Court to Berlin's 
social ostracism of the Jews. William's broaden- 
ing perceptions grasped now the necessity of 
putting an end to both these survivals of intoler- 
ance. The blatant Stoecker was given the hint 
to resign and an enlightened clergyman was in- 
stalled in his place. At a Parliamentary dinner, 
given by Caprivi on November 25th, to which, 
according to the new order of things, the leaders 
in opposition were invited quite as freely as sup- 
porters of the Ministry, the Emperor met Dr. Wind- 
horst, the venerable chief of the Ultramontane 
party. All present noted the exceptional courtesy 
and attention which William paid to "the Pearl of 
Meppen," and construed it to signify that the days 
of anti-Catholic bias were dead and gone. This 
judgment has been so far justified by events that, 
when Dr. Windhorst died in the succeeding 
March, it was said of him that of all his aims 
he left only the readmission of the Jesuits un- 
accomplished. 

William's speeches during the year marked a 
distinct advance in the art of oratory, and gave 
fewer evidences of loose and random thinking 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK. 201 

after he rose to his feet than were offered by his 
earlier harangues. At the swearing-in of the re- 
cruits for the BerUn garrison, on November 20th, 
he dehvered a curiously theological address, saying 
that though the situation abroad was peaceful 
enough, the soldiers must bear their share with 
other honest Germans in combating an internal 
foe, who was only to be overcome by the aid of 
Christianity. No one could be a good soldier 
without being a good Christian, and therefore the 
recruits who took an oath of allegiance to their 
earthly master, should even more resolve to be 
true to their heavenly Lord and Saviour. 

Ten days later William made a speech of a 
notably different sort in front of the statue of the 
Great Elector, the 250th anniversary of whose 
accession to the throne of Brandenburg fell upon 
the 1st of December. Reference has heretofore 
been made to the powerful effect produced upon 
the young man's mind by reading the story of this 
ancestor, in preparation for this speech. There 
was nothing at all in it about loyalty to celestial 
sovereignties, but it bristled with fervent eulogies 
of the fighting Hohenzollerns, and was filled with 
military similes and phraseology. It contained as 
well the veiled comparison between Schwarzenberg 
and Bismarck which has been spoken of elsewhere. 

Within the week the Kaiser delivered another 
speech, much longer than the other, and of vastly 



202 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

closer human interest. It had evidently been 
thought out with great care, and may unquestion- 
ably be described as the most important public 
deliverance of his reign. When he ascended the 
throne no one on earth would have hazarded the 
guess that, at the expiration of three years, 
William's principal speech would remain one 
upon the subject of middle education ! 

The occasion was a special conference convened 
by him to discuss educational reform in Prussia, 
and the gathering included not only the most 
distinguished professors and specialists within the 
kingdom, but representative men from various 
other German states. A list of the members would 
present to the reader the names of half the living 
Germans who are illustrious in literature and the 
sciences. The session was opened by the Emperor 
as presiding officer at Berlin, on December 4th. 

It was wholly characteristic of the young man 
that, having tabled a series of inquiries upon the 
subject, he should start off with a compre- 
hensive and sustained attack upon the whole 
gymnasium^ or higher public school, system of the 
country. The Conference, having been summoned 
to examine the possibility of any further improve- 
ment upon this system, heard with astonishment 
its imperial chairman open the proceedings by 
roundly assailing everything connected with, and 
typical of, the entire institution, 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK, 203 

The importance of the speech can best be grasped 
b}^ keeping in mind the unique reputation which 
the Prussian school system has for years enjoyed 
in the eyes of the world. Its praises have been 
the burden of whole libraries of books. The 
amazing succession of victories on the fields of 
1870-71 which rendered the Franco-Prussian War 
so pitifully one-sided a conflict, have been over 
and over again ascribed to the superior education 
of the German gymnasia even more than to the 
needle-gun — and this too by French writers among 
the rest. The Germans are justifiably proud of 
their wonderful army, but it is probable that a 
year ago they had an even loftier pride in their 
schools. The teachers are in themselves an 
army, and have traditionally exerted an influence, 
and commanded a measure of public deference, 
which the pedagogues of other lands know nothing 
about. It required, therefore, an abnormal degree 
of moral courage for even an Emperor to stand up 
in cold blood and make an attack upon the sacred 
institution of the gymnasium. It is even more 
remarkable that what the young man had to say 
was so fresh and strong and nervously to the point, 
that it carried conviction to the minds of a great 
majority of the scholastic greybeards who heard it. 

He began by saying that the gymnasia (answer- 
ing roughly to the Latin schools of England and 
the grammar-schools or academies of America) had 



204 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

in their time done good service, but no longer 
answered the requirements of the nation or the 
necessities of the time. They produced crammed 
minds, not virile men; wasting on musty Latin 
and general classical lore the time which should 
be devoted to inculcating a knowledge of German 
language and history — knowledge which was of 
infinitely more value to a German than all the 
chronicles of an alien antiquity combined. Had 
these schools done anything to combat the follies 
and chimeras of Social Democracy ? Alas ! the 
answer must be something worse than a negative — 
and tell not alone of an urgent duty left undone, but 
of evil wrought on the other side. He himself had 
sat on the various forms of a gymnasium at Cassel 
— a very fair sample of that whole class of schools 
— and he therefore knew all about their ways and 
methods, and the sooner these were mended the 
better it would be for every one. 

It was undoubtedly true, William went on to 
admit, that in 1864, 1866, and 1870 the Prussian 
teachers' work showed to advantage. They had 
in those past years done a good deal to inculcate, 
and thus help to fruition, the idea of national 
unity — and it was safe to say that during that 
period every one who completed his gymnasium 
course went away after the final examination 
convinced that the German Empire should be re- 
established, and crowned by the restoration of 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK. 205 

Alsace-Lorraine. But with 1871 this practical 
process of education came abruptly to an end, 
although as a matter of fact there was more than 
ever a need of teaching young Germans the im- 
portance of preserving their Empire and itspolitical 
system intact. The consequence was that certain 
malignant forces had grown up and developed to a 
threatening degree, and for this the schools were 
clearly to blame. 

Since 1870, he proceeded, there had been in 
German education a veritable reign of the -philo- 
logists. They had been sitting there enthroned in 
the gymnasia^ devoting all their attention to stuff- 
ing their pupils' skulls with mere book-learning, 
without even a thought of striving to form their 
characters aright, or training them for the real 
needs and trials of practical life. This evil had 
gone so far that it could go no farther. He knew 
that it was the custom to describe him as a 
fanatical foe to the gymnasium system. This was 
not true ; only he had an open eye for its defects as 
well as its merits — of which, unfortunately, there 
seemed a heavy preponderance of the former. 

Chief among these defects, to his mind, was a 
preposterous partiality for the classics. He sub- 
mitted to his hearers, as patriots no less than 
professors, that the basis of this public school 
education should be German, and the aim kept 
always ni view should be to turn out young 



2o6 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

Germans, not young Greeks and Romans. There 
must be an end to this folly. They must cou- 
rageously break away from the mediaeval and monk- 
ish habit of mumbling over much Latin and some 
Greek, and take to the German language as the 
basis of their teaching. This remark applied also 
to history. Thoroughness in German history, 
both authenticated and legendary, and in its 
geographical and ethnological connections, should 
be first of all insisted upon. It was only when 
they wfere wholly familiar with the ins and outs of 
their own house that they could afford the time to 
moon about in a museum. 

*' When I was at school at Cassel," said William, 
** the Great Elector, for instance, was to me only 
a nebulous personage. As for the Seven Years' 
War, it lay outside my region of study altogether, 
and for me history ended with the French Revolu- 
tion at the close of the last century. The Libera- 
tion Wars, all-important as they are for the young 
German, were not even mentioned, and it was 
only, thank God ! by means of supplementary and 
most valuable lectures from my private tutor. Dr. 
Hinzpeter, whom I rejoice now to see before me, 
that I got to know anything at all about modern 
history. How is it that so many of our young 
Germans are seduced from the path of political 
virtue ? How is it that we have so many muddle- 
headed would-be world-improvers amongst us ? 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK. 207 

How is it that we all the time hear so much 
nagging at our own government and so much 
praise of every other government under the sun ? 
The answer is very easy. It is due to the simple 
ignorance of all these professional reformers and 
renovators as to the genesis of modern Germany. 
They were not taught, the boys of to-day are not 
taught, to comprehend at all the transition period 
between the French Revolution and our own time, 
by the light of which alone can our present ques- 
tions be understood ! " 

Not only would the gymnasia have to mend their 
methods, he continued, both as to matter taught 
and the method of teaching it, but they must also 
reduce the time burden under which they now 
crush their pupils. It was cruel and inhuman to 
compel boys to work so hard at their books that 
they had no leisure for healthful recreation, and 
the necessary physical training and development 
of the body. If he himself, while at Cassel, had 
not had special opportunities for riding to and fro, 
and looking about him a little, he would never 
have got to know at all what the outside world 
was like. It was this barbarous one-sided and 
eternal cramming which had already made the 
nation suffer from a plethora of learned and so- 
called educated people, the number of whom was 
now more than the people themselves could bear, 
or the Empire either. So true it was what Bis- 



2o8 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

marck had once said about all this "proletariat 
of pass-men " — this army of what were called 
hunger candidates, and of journalists who were 
also for the most part unsuccessful graduates of 
the gymnasia, was here on their hands, forming a 
class truly dangerous to society ! 

-The speech contained a great many practical 
and even technical references to bad ventilation, 
the curse of near-sightedness, and other details 
which need no mention here, but which indicated 
deep interest in, and a very comprehensive grasp 
of, the entire subject. At the close of the Con- 
ference, on December 17th, he made another 
address, from which we may cull a paragraph as a 
peroration to this whole curious imperial deliver- 
ance upon education. After an apology for having 
in his previous remarks neglected any reference to 
religion — upon which his profound belief that his 
duty as King was to foster religious sentiments 
and a Christian spirit was as clearly visible to the 
German people as the noonday light itself — he 
struck this true fin de siecle note as the key to his 
attitude on the entire subject : 

" We find ourselves now, after marking step so 
long, upon the order of a general forward move- 
ment into the new century. My ancestors, with 
their fingers upon the pulse of time, have ever 
kept an alert and intelligent lookout upon the 
promises and threats of the future, and thus have 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK. 209 

throughout been able to maintain themselves at 
the head of whatever movement they resolved to 
embrace and direct. I believe that I have 
mastered the aims and impulses of this new spirit 
which thrills the expiring century. As on the 
question of social reform, so in this grave matter 
of the teaching of our young, I have decided to 
lead, rather than oppose, the working out of these 
new and progressive tendencies. The maxim of 
my family, * To every one his due,' has for its 
true meaning 'To each what is properly his,* 
which is a very different thing from * The same to 
all.' Thus interpreted the motto governs our 
position here, and the decisions we have arrived 
at. Hitherto our course in education has been 
from Thermopylae, by Cannae, up to Rossbach and 
Vionville. It is my desire to lead the youth of 
Germany from the starting-point of Sedan and 
Gravelotte, by Leuthen and Rossbach, back to 
Mantinea and Thermopylae, which I hold to be 
the more excellent way." 

The effect of this pronouncement upon the 
German public was electrical. For years there 
had been growing up in the popular mind a notion 
that something was wrong with the gymnasitmt, 
but no one had had the courage to define, much 
less proclaim, what the real trouble was. Parents 
had seen their sons condemned to thirty hours 
per week in the gymnasmn (involving an even 



210 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

greater study time outside), and vaguely marvelled 
that of these thirty hours ten should be given to 
Latin and six to Greek, whereas mathematics 
claimed only four, geography and history com- 
bined got only three, German and French had but 
two each, natural science fluctuated between two 
and one, and English did not appear at all.^ But 
though there was everywliere a nebulous suspicion 
and dislike of the system, it enjoyed the sacred 
immunity from attack of a fetich. So wonderful 
a thing was it held to be, in all printed and spoken 
speech, that people hardly dared harbour their own 
skeptical thoughts about it. But when the young 
Kaiser bluntly announced his conviction that it 
was all stupid and vicious and harmful, and 
pledged himself with boldness to sweep away the 
classical rubbish and put practical modern educa- 
tion in its place, the parents of Germany, to use 
Herr von Bunsen's phrase, were simply enchanted. 
During the five months which have elapsed no 
miracle has been wrought ; the character of the 
gymnasia has not been changed by magic. But 
it is perfectly understood by everybody that the 
Kaiser intends having his own way, and being as 
good as his word. Important steps have already 
been taken to enforce his views upon the system — 
notably by a change in the Ministry of Instruction. 

* See the interesting tabular statement in S. Baring- Gould's 
"Germany Past and Present," p. i8i. London, 1881. 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK, 211 

Dr. Gustav von Gossler had held the portfolio for 
ten years, and was so entrenched in the liking of 
the great body of professors and teachers that he 
assumed his position to be perfectly secure. 
When, in the summer of 1889, the young Emperor 
despatched to him a long memorandum on the 
reforms necessary in the higher schools of Prussia, 
he received it submissively, even sympathetically, 
put it in a pigeon-hole, and went on in the same 
old dry-as- dust classical rut. William said nothing 
more, but eighteen months later, when he sum- 
moned the Educational Conference, he simul- 
taneously published the text of the memorandum 
of the previous year. Even then Gossler seems to 
have suspected no danger, and made an official 
speech at the opening of the session full of amiable 
and confident commonplaces. On the following 
New Year's Day, however — January ist, of the 
present year — a peremptory warning came to him 
in the form of a gift from the palace. It was a 
handsomely framed photograph of William II, 
and above the dashing signature were written the 
significant words, ^^ Sic volo, sic jtibeo.'' It is not 
strange that shortly thereafter the retirement of 
von Gossler was announced. 

His successor, Count Zedlitz-Triitschler, al- 
though beginning his career in the army, long 
ago revealed abilities which suggested his being 
drafted off into civil work. He has sat in the 

14 



212 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

Reichstag as a Free Conservative, has been 
Governor of Silesia, and is both an excellent 
speaker and a man of great tact and resource. 
Among the reforms which he has already seen his 
way to enforce is one by which the students of 
the gymnasia report the number of hours out of 
school in which they are compelled to study to 
keep up with their lessons — these reports serving 
as a basis for the monthly rearrangement of tasks 
in such a way as to leave enough time for recrea- 
tion. The study of German and other modern 
tongues has also largely displaced the classical 
curriculum in the three lower classes of the 
gymnasia. Count Zedlitz is the Minister, more- 
over, having to deal with ecclesiastical affairs, 
and his sympathies are all upon the side of 
toleration and of a good understanding with the 
Vatican. 

On this same New Year's Day William sent a 
photograph also to the venerable Postmaster- 
General, Herr von Stephan, bearing a written 
legend not less characteristic than the other. It 
ran thus : ** Intercommunication is the sign under 
which the world stands at the close of the present 
century. The barriers separating nations are 
thereby overthrown, and new relations established 
between them." Upon the sentiment thus ex- 
pressed much of great importance to Germany 
and to Europe depends. 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK. 213 

Brief as has been the career of the present 
German Empire amon^ nations, its history already 
covers one very remarkable and complete volte face 
on economic subjects, and the beginnings of what 
promises to be a second and almost as sweeping 
change. Up to 1876, with Delbriick as President 
of the Chancellery and Camphausen as Minister of 
Finance, Germany stood for as liberal a spirit of 
international trade relations as at least any other 
nation on the Continent. But in that year 
Bismarck, by a combination of the various Con- 
servative factions which leaned toward high tariffs, 
inaugurated a Protectionist policy which forced 
these Ministers out and ranged the German Empire 
definitely on the other side of the economic wall. 
To the end of Bismarck's rule, Germany steadily 
drifted away from Free Trade and toward the 
ideals of Russia, Thibet, and the Republican party 
in the United States. But even before Bismarck's 
fall it became apparent that the young Emperor 
took broader views on this subject than his 
Chancellor, and during the past year several im- 
portant steps have been taken toward bringing 
Germany forward once more into line with modern 
conceptions of emancipated trade. A liberal 
Treaty of Commerce has been signed with Austro- 
Hungary — the precursor, it is believed, of others 
with countries now committed to stupid and injuri- 
ous tariff wars, while at home no secret is made of 



214 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

the ministerial intention to in time reduce duties 
on cereals, lumber, and other necessaries, and gene- 
rally pursue a tariff reform policy. The Reichstag 
has during the year passed a bill which, beginning 
in August of 1892, spreads over five years the ex- 
tinction of the sugar bounties, another great bul- 
wark of the rich protectionist ring. An attack 
upon the spirit bounties is expected next, while the 
Upper House of the Prussian Diet has just passed 
the new Graded Income Tax Bill which is to pave 
the way to a return from tariff to direct taxation. 

The inspiring source of these reforms is Dr. 
Miquel, whose rise to imperial favour during the 
labour crisis has been noted, and who succeeded 
von Scholz as Minister of Finance in June of 1890. 
He furnishes still another illustration of the debt 
which German public life owes to the absorption, 
two centuries ago, of that leaven of Huguenot 
blood to which reference has heretofore been 
made — and which has long played in Prussia as 
disproportionately important a part as the remain- 
ing Protestant strain has in the politics of France. 
Herr Miquel looks like a Frenchman, and his 
manner, at once polished, genial, and grave, is 
that of a statesman reared on the Seine rather 
than the Vecht. 

In one sense he is scarcely a new man, since he 
sat in the Prussian Parliament before the days of 
the Empire, and was years ago regarded as 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK. 215 

dividing with Bennigsen the leadership of the 
National Liberal party. He is in his sixty-third 
year, and might long since have been a Minister 
had he not felt it incompatible with his self- 
respect to take a portfolio under Bismarck's 
whimsical and arrogant mastership. In this 
present period of uncertainty in German politics, 
filled as it is with warring rumours of impending 
reconciliations and hints of even more deeply 
embittered quarrels, prophecy is forbidden, but no 
one on either side attempts a forecast of the 
future which does not assign to Miquel a pre- 
dominant part. 

His administrative abilities are of a very high 
order, and he combines with them much breadth 
of vision and great personal authority. The 
reliance placed upon him by the Emperor has 
been a subject of comment, almost from the first 
meeting of the two men, and German pubHc 
opinion gives him no rival in influence over the 
imperial mind. It was at the dinner-table of this 
Minister last February that William is said to 
have replied to a long argument by Baron Kardorff 
in favour of bimetallism : ** Personally I am a gold 
man, and for the rest I leave everything to 
Miquel." 

With the impending retirement of von Maybach, 
Minister of Public Works and Railways, von Boet- 
ticher will be the only remaining Minister of 



2i6 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

eleven who held portfolios when William I died 
in March, 1888. It seems probable that the 
present year will outlive even this exception. 
The change in governmental spirit and methods 
of which Berlin is more and more conscious, is 
not wholly a matter of new men. The weight of 
militarism is being lifted. Generals no longer 
play the part they did in purely civil affairs. 
Count Waldersee's retirement from his great post 
as Chief of the General Staff is popularly ascribed 
to his having attempted to interfere with the 
amount and distribution of the military budget. 
Five years ago such an interference would have 
seemed to everybody the most natural thing in the 
world. The Emperor, too, grows less fond of 
obtruding the martial side of his training and 
temperament. From a beginning in which he 
seemed to think that Germany existed principally 
for the purpose of supporting an army, he has 
grown to see the true proportion of things and to 
give military matters hardly more than their 
legitimate share of his attention. The death of 
Moltke has removed the last great soldier who 
could speak authoritatively for the army in the 
Reichstag. In that sense at least he has left no heir. 
In the more troubled domain of foreign affairs, 
the year without Bismarck has been marked by 
fewer visible changes. We are well along into ** a 
year without Crispi," also, but the Triple Alliance, 



A YEAR WITHOUT BISMARCK. 217 

if less demonstrative in its professions of mutual 
affection and pride than formerly, seems no whit 
diminished in substantial unity. At the moment, 
peace appears to be as secure as it has been 
during any year since 1880 — which is another way 
of saying that the weight of force and determi- 
nation is still on the side of the Triple Alliance. 

There has been during the twelvemonth only 
one sensational incident to mar the polite, 
business-like relations which Caprivi maintains 
with the nations of the earth. The unfortunate 
incidents attending the visit in February of the 
Empress Frederic to Paris, are too fresh in the 
public memory to call for recapitulation here. 
It seems fair to say that it is not easy to imagine 
so pacific and sensible an ending to such a stormy 
episode having been arrived at in the days of 
Bismarck. The young Kaiser, whom Europe 
thought of as a firebrand when he ascended the 
throne, kept his temper, or at least prevented its 
making a mark upon the policy of his government, 
in a striking manner. He had just gone out of 
his way to conciliate French feeling by writing a 
graceful message of condolence upon the death of 
Meissonier. The foolish insults to his mother, 
with which this act of courtesy was answered by 
the Parisian rabble, failed to provoke any retort 
in kind. Indeed, when it was represented to him 
that the increased rigour of passport regulations in 



2i8 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

Alsace-Lorraine was being construed as a reprisal, 
he issued orders to modify this rigour. 

With this exhibition of judicious restraint, 
which rises to the full measure of the vast 
responsibilities and anxious necessities of his 
position, our chronological record of William's 
three-years' reign may be fittingly brought to a 
close. The added narrative which is held in store 
for us by the future may be tempestuous and dis- 
coloured by fire and blood ; far better, it may be a 
gentle story of increasing wisdom, of good deeds 
done and peace made a natural state instead of an 
emergency in the minds of men. But whichever 
betides, we have seen enough to feel that it will 
be the chronicle of a real man, active, self-centred, 
eager to achieve and resolute to act, of high 
temper and great ambitions, and who has been 
given such a chance by the fates to help or hurt 
his fellow-mortals as perhaps no other young man 
ever had. 

In a concluding chapter some notice may 
properly be taken of the personal attributes of 
William, and of his daily walk and talk as a 
human being as well as a Kaiser. 



CHAPTER XII. 

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

In the matter of personal appearance there are 
two quite distinct and different Williams. Those 
who see the young German Emperor on a State 
occasion think of him as almost a tall man, with 
a stern, thoughtful face and the most distinguished 
bearing of any sovereign in Europe. He holds 
himself with arrow-like straightness, bears his 
uniform or robes with proud grace, and draws his 
features into a kind of mask of imperial dignity 
and reserved wisdom and strength very impressive 
to the beholder. It is with what may be called 
this official countenance of William's that the 
general public is chiefly familiar, for he assumes 
it in front of the photographer's camera, just as 
he does on parade, at formal gatherings, and even 
in his carriage when he drives through the streets 



220 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

There is nothing to cavil at in this. One of the 
most important functions of an Emperor must 
surely be to look like an Emperor. 

But in private life, when the absence of 
ceremonial and the presence of none but friends 
permit him to unbend, we see quite another 
William. He does not now give the impression 
of being a tall man, and his face wears a softened 
and kindly expression prone to break into an 
extremely sweet and winning smile. When this 
smiling mood is upon him he looks curiously Hke 
his uncle, the Duke of Connaught, although at 
other times the resemblance is not apparent. As 
a boy he was very white-skinned, with pale flaxen 
hair. Years of military outdoor life burned his 
face to a tawny brown, through which of late an 
unhealthy pallor, the product of overwork and 
sleeplessness, at times shows itself. His hair is 
of average darkness, but his small and habitually 
curled moustache is of a light yellowish colour. 

An observer who studied him closely during a 
whole day when he visited Russia three years ago 
describes him at the first morning review of troops 
as carrying himself almost pompously erect, and 
wearing a countenance of such gloomy severity 
that everybody was afraid to approach him, so 
that the officers who saw him for the first time 
jokingly whispered to one another that a new 
William the Taciturn had come into being. But 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 221 

in the afternoon, when the Czarina presided over 
a little garden party, limited almost to the circle 
of royalty, William appeared in a straw hat and 
jaunty holiday costume, smoked cigarettes con- 
tinuously, and laughed and chatted with every- 
body as gaily and affably as any little bank book- 
keeper snatching an unaccustomed day in the 
country. 

The dominant feature of his make-up is a rest- 
less and tireless physical energy. In this he is 
perhaps more English than German. The insular 
tendency of his out-of-door tastes is very marked. 
Probably there is no gentleman on the Continent 
who keeps a keener or more interested watch upon 
the details of English sport, year by year, than 
William does. Oxford will not soon forget his 
characteristic telegram to Max Miiller, recently, 
congratulating the University crew upon their 
victory in the annual race, and every British 
yachtsman looks forward to this season's regatta 
at Cowes with added interest, from the fact that 
the Emperor intends personally competing with 
his newly-purchased yacht. 

William rides like an Englishman — which is 
another way of saying that he cuts a better figure 
in the saddle than most of the other Hohenzol- 
lerns, notoriously bad horsemen as a rule, have 
done. He has all the British passion for the sea 
and matters maritime. In his speech to the 



2 22 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

officers of the English fleet at Athens he said 
that his interest in their navy dated from the 
earliest days of his hoyhood, when he played 
about Portsmouth dockyard and gained impres- 
sions of the vastness and splendour of British 
shipping which had vividly coloured his imagina- 
tion for all time. No other German ruler has 
ever given so much thought to naval matters, 
and it is his openly-expressed ambition to give the 
Empire during his reign a fighting fleet which 
shall rank among the great navies of the world. 
During the debates in the Reichstag last March 
on the excessive naval estimates, he sent to the 
chairman of that special budget committee a copy 
of an old painting representing the fleet of the 
Great Elector, with footnotes in his own imperial 
hand giving the names and armaments of the 
various vessels, and bearing the inscription : " To 
Herr von Koscielski, in remembrance of his manly 
advocacy of my navy, from his grateful Emperor 
and King.'' 

William's love of exercise for its own sake is 
truly English. He fences admirably, is a skilful 
boatman, swims and bowls well and with zest, 
and delights in mountain climbing. No other 
Prussian Prince has ever been so fond of shooting. 
Hohenzollern notions of this particular sport have 
for generations been a matter for derision among 
Englishmen. Even Carlyle, who will hardly be 




William II. in Hunting Costume. 

iFrom a photograph hy Selle & Kuntze, Potsdam:) 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 225 

described as a sportsman, was alive to the gro- 
tesque features of the Parforce Jagd, that curious 
institution in the Potsdam Green Forest which 
owes its origin to Frederic WilHam I. The Smi- 
garten is still there, and young boars, bred in 
captivity and bereft of their tusks at a tender age, 
are still released from their pens when the first 
frosts of autumn fall, and after a start of a few 
minutes are chased by mounted and gaily capari- 
soned parties of huntsmen — for all the world like 
the tame lion hunts of the Sardanapalian deca- 
dence pictured for us by the Assyrian palace 
friezes. But William has never shown much 
admiration for this pet diversion of the Potsdam 
officers. His own tastes are for the most laborious 
and difficult forms of woodland sport, and he is 
an exceptionally good shot. 

What renders all this the more remarkable is 
the fact that his left arm is practically paralyzed. 
He has trained himself to hold the rein with it 
when he rides, but that is the sum of its useful- 
ness. This defect dates from the occasion of his 
birth, and is ascribed to the ignorance or inepti- 
tude of a physician. The arm is four inches 
shorter than its fellow, and has a malformed 
hand with only rudimentary fingers. The arm is 
so wholly limp that William has to lift its hand 
to even place it on the hilt of his sword with his 
right hand. It is in this posture, or else in the 



226 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

breast of his coat, that he customarily carries it 
when out of the saddle. All his photographs show 
it thus disposed of. At the table he has a com- 
bined knife and fork, which slide into each other. 
He uses this with much dexterity, first to cut up 
his meat and then to eat it, all of course with one 
hand. 

To have become a skilled marksman under such 
a weighty disadvantage indicates great patience 
and determination. William uses a very light 
English gun, having abandoned in despair the 
attempt to get any made to his liking in Germany, 
and carries it on his shoulder with the stock 
behind him. At the proper moment he brings the 
weapon forward by a movement of his right 
arm, with incredible swiftness and deadly accuracy 
of aim. 

Of much graver importance, of course, is the 
internal inflammation of the ear, formerly compli- 
cated at times with an acute earache, with which 
he has now been afflicted for a number of years. 
Just what the affection is no one has yet been 
able to determine. It grows worse in cold and 
wet weather, and that is about all that is known 
of it. The physicians disagree as to its character. 
William himself, though occasionally suffering 
grievously from it, has never been alarmed about 
it, and really believes it to be a local ailment. Its 
existence naturally enough suffices to create a 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 227 

certain uneasiness in the minds of his friends, and 
of Gerrnans generally, and serves as the fruitful 
source of alarming rumours by which, from time 
to time, the virtue of Continental bourses is 
systematically assailed. But no responsible pro- 
fessional man seems to regard it as necessarily 
dangerous. This year, although the Emperor's 
appearance shows evident signs of the wear and 
strain of his great burdens upon his strength and 
spirits, this particular affection is said to be less 
troublesome than usual. 

Undoubtedly, however, this annoying and 
wearying burden of the flesh has a great deal 
to do with William's disposition towards nervous 
excitability and restlessness. A man with the 
earache cannot be expected to hold calm mastery 
over all his moods. It is a reasonable assumption, 
too, that to this affliction is in some measure 
due his phenomenal and unseasonable physical 
activity. Sometimes it happens that he is unable 
to sleep at all, and he habitually keeps notebooks 
and pencils within reach of his bedside, upon 
which to work until the demon of insomnia is 
exorcised. Upon occasion, for distraction, he routs 
out the garrison of Berlin, or some regiment of it, 
before daybreak. In any case he rises at five. 

Both at home and when abroad the amount of 
labour he gets through in a day is almost without 
parallel. It is a commonplace experience for hin; 



228 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

to do four hours' work in his Berlin study in the 
early morning ; then take a train to Potsdam and 
spend the remainder of the forenoon in reviewing 
troops ; then trot back in the saddle with his 
staff over the distance of eighteen miles; devote 
the afternoon to the transaction of business with 
his Ministers and officials ; receive and return the 
calls of two or three visiting royal personages; 
then dine somewhere where a speech must be 
made, and get back to the palace for more work 
before bedtime. 

In Constantinople and the scarcely less Oriental 
Athens they still recall his energetic daily routine 
with bewildered astonishment. He was up long 
before the drowsy muezzins from the minarets 
summon the faithful at the hour of prayer — ratthng 
indefatigably about to see all the sights, reviewing 
the Sultan's troops, inspecting all the chief military 
establishments, War Ministry, military school, 
artillery barracks, and what not besides, asking 
questions of everybody who had anything to tell, 
peering into every nook and cranny with an 
insatiable curiosity, working through it all upon 
notes of instruction and reference to be forwarded 
to Berlin every evening, and then sitting up until 
all the others were yawning with sleep. 

Of course he could not bear the strain of this 
constant activity if he were not endowed with 
two great gifts — prodigious physical vitality and 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 229 

imagination. Mere strength alone, mated with 
dulness of mind, would be broken down and 
destroyed by the wear and tear of such a life. 
William is, physically and mentally, the heir of 
the best things which European royalty has to 
offer. He inherits the bodily force and resolution 
of the Hohenzollerns, the savoir faire and comeli- 
ness of the Guelphs, the intellectual acuteness 
and philosophical tastes of the Coburgs, and 
the romantic mediaeval Ascanien strain which 
Catherine II took to Russia and her grand- 
daughter brought back again to Weimar — a 
leaven half divine half daemonic, which swings 
between genius and madness. The product of 
these marriages might be expected to be what he 
is — by far the most striking personality in the 
whole gallery of contemporary kings. 

What other dynasty in Western Europe does 
not envy William his six handsome, sturdy, and 
superbly healthy little sons ? Seeing them with 
their shining, bright-eyed faces and ordinary well- 
worn clothes, one cannot but reflect upon the 
contrast afforded at Vienna, where the great rival 
house of Hapsburg is dying miserably out in pallid 
epileptics and vicious dullards. 

These six fine boys, the oldest of whom is now 
in his tenth year, are reared in the Spartan tradi- 
tions of the Hohenzollerns. Winter and summer 
they are up at six o'clock and into their cold tubg 



230 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

with merciless punctuality. As a rule they break- 
fast with their father half an hour later, and 
throughout the meal he talks with them alone. 
They salute him on entering, and again on leaving, 
in military fashion ; even at this tender age a con- 
siderable portion of their education is upon martial 
subjects. The Emperor, in his recent speech at 
Bonn, indicated an intention of having the Crown 
Prince eventually matriculate there, but for the 
present, as soon as the lads outgrow their private 
tutors it is understood that they are to go to the 
great cadet school at Lichterfelde, just outside 
Berlin. Evidently the gymnasium has no part in 
the plans for their education. 

The predominance of the military idea, which 
envelops even these little baby princes, is in- 
deed the keynote to every phase of their father's 
character. He is first of all a soldier. He 
lives a plain and simple life ; the service and 
routine of his palaces are those of an officer's 
mess. He is a heavy eater, with a preference 
for homely dishes ; he smokes great numbers 
of light Dutch cigars which cost about three 
halfpence each. He addresses all persons whom 
he meets in an official capacity in the terse 
form and curt, sharp tone of a drill sergeant. 
Although in private conversation with friends his 
voice is soft and pleasant, all his public speeches 
are declaimed in a harsh and rattling voice, with 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 231 

abruptly ended sentences. His relations with 
other Germans, from the kings down to the 
peasants, are, in short, those of a commanding 
officer on the parade ground. This attitude does 
not suggest tact, or lend itself to roundabout 
methods. The bluntly-expressed rescripts to the 
officers of the army which William from time to 
time has issued, complaining about the harsh per- 
sonal treatment of the men, denouncing gambling 
and extravagant living, and so on, might easily 
have provoked a spirit of discontent in a country 
less wholly ruled by the idea of military discipline. 

Naturally enough, his innate liking for display 
and scenic effects is strongly coloured by mili- 
tarism. He cannot see too many uniforms about 
him, and he literally inundates Berlin with 
martial pageants. One might suppose that the 
effect of this would be to satiate the Berliners, 
but they maintain a most vigorous and unabated 
interest in seeing the troops march by, and throng 
the sidewalks every time as if the spectacle had 
all the excitement of novelty. 

In almost every other country the personal 
tastes or whims of the sovereign, if he be at all 
a man of the world, leave a certain mark upon 
the every-day dress of the people about him. 
The Prince of Wales, for example, during the 
quarter century in which he has assumed the 
social work of his mother's reign, has made a 



232 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

good many changes in the fashions of men's 
clothes — changes which have been respected in 
Melbourne and Washington and Toronto as well 
as in London. But hardly anybody in Germany 
has ever seen the adult William in citizen's clothes 
— and positively no one ever thinks of him save 
as in uniform. 

As William is a soldier in manners and habits, 
so his conceptions of government and of domestic 
statecraft are largely those which might be ex- 
pected in a chief of staff. He addresses his people 
always as their commander-in-chief. The starting- 
point of his resolve to get rid of Bismarck and 
bring in new men like Miquel and Caprivi, was 
his discovery that the Chancellor and the various 
political parties and factions which he alternately 
bullied and cajoled were really so many impedi- 
ments standing between him and his subjects. 
The Hohenzollern desired to speak directly to the 
people, as a general to his army, and he has 
swept aside whatever stood in the way. Such 
a posture does not, at first sight, seem to promise 
much for progress and enlightened development, 
but it must be remembered that universal service 
in the army has had the effect of familiarizing all 
other Germans with this same point of view, so 
that really sovereign and subjects get on much 
better together than in many countries nominally 
more free. 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 233 

The difficulties of government in Germany are 
almost wholly social and economic. The Prussian 
artizan, perforce, spends seven years at school 
and three years in the army before he seriously 
takes up his trade and sets to v^^orking for himself. 
He marries early and has a sv^arm of children, 
and the necessity of toiling to support all these 
in an overcrowded and underpaid labour market 
grinds upon his temper. He has, to begin with, 
a racial tendency to think highly of himself and 
to criticize other people ; he is afforded only too 
much justification for his rooted dislike of aristo- 
crats, employers, and rich people generally, who 
in Germany are much less generous and con- 
siderate than in some other countries. Thus he 
is peculiarly open to the arguments and allure- 
ments of the social democratic propaganda. 

The Kaiser's idea is to meet and counteract 
this by appealing to the workman's military re- 
collections and pride. It is difficult for outsiders 
to realize the potency of this appeal. Americans 
and Englishmen see the scores of thousands of 
young Germans who expatriate themselves to 
escape military service, and assume, therefore, 
that it must be a hateful thing. To those who 
look forward to it this may be true. But to the 
poor German artizan who looks backward upon 
it this term of service in the army is apt to seem 
the pleasantCBt period of his life. By comparison 



234 THE YOUNG EMPEROR, 

with the hardships of his later independent 
struggle for existence, he comes to regard this 
time when he was fed and clothed and instructed 
and lodged, and wore a uniform, with affectionate 
regret. 

William, with what seems a sound instinct, 
lays great stress upon keeping alive and strengthen- 
ing this army spirit. His wish is so to extend 
a semi-military organization throughout the social 
structure that every German may continue to feel 
that he belongs to the army. To this end he 
encourages the founding in each village of a Land- 
wehrhezirksverein, or military club, where veterans 
and reservists are invited to come and read the 
papers over their beer and pipes, take charge 
of anniversary celebrations, promote local shooting 
festivals, and keep Social Democrats at a health- 
ful distance. This plan is reported to be working 
well in small places, but it has not been thus far 
of much service in cities and factory centres, and 
in Mainz the attempt has just been abandoned 
owing to the discovery that all the members had 
become Social Democrats. But it is important 
to notice that since William has actively in- 
terested himself in the condition of these lower 
social strata, and sharply rated employers and army 
officers for harsh treatment of their men, the tone 
of the Socialists in the Reichstag toward him has 
been quite as civil as that gf the other members. 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS, 235 

For a young man descended from such phenom- 
enally thrifty people as the Hohenzollerns and 
Wettins have always been, William has re- 
markably lavish, not to say prodigal, notions 
about money. He was left a very rich man by 
his father's death, and a complaisant Reichstag 
shortly thereafter largely increased the amount 
of his civil list, but for all that prudent Germans 
shake their heads over the immense schemes of 
expenditure to which he is already committed. 
The outlay upon the renovation of the Old Schloss 
in Berlin, entered upon in the first months of his 
reign, startled these good souls, but that turned 
out to be a mere drop in the bucket. The whole 
park arrangements at Potsdam are to be altered, 
and the unsightly old Dom — or cathedral — facing 
the Lustgarten in Berlin, has been torn down 
to make room for a magnificent ecclesiastical 
edifice worthy of the German . capital. This 
means a heavy bill of expense, and Berliners hear 
with mingled emotions that their Royal Opera 
House is also to come doyvn, to be supplanted 
by a wonderful new structure rivalling in dimen- 
sions and cost the Grand Opera House in Paris. 

This last plan reflects the most marked artistic 
sense discoverable in William. He is passionately 
fond of the theatre, and has enlightened views 
about its popular usefulness. In decorating the 
tragedian, Ludwig Barnay, he has put on record 



236 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

an act by a Prussian King which not even his 
grandfather, the old Kaiser, enamoured of all 
things connected with the stage as he was, could 
be brought to contemplate. He delighted in the 
company of players to the end of his days, but 
he always frowned when the possibility of stars 
and ribbons was hinted at. William's action, 
therefore, deserves special notice. It must be 
admitted that his attitude toward the drama is 
dictatorial to a degree — very like that which a 
general might be assumed to occupy toward a 
band of mummers allowed inside the camp to amuse 
the soldiers; but the German drama is framed 
to resist a great deal of pressure to the square 
inch, and is^ indeed rather the better for it. Very 
comical are the stories told in Berlin of the way 
in which William personally superintended the 
rehearsals of Wildenbruch's " The New Lord '* 
last winter, criticizing and instructing the actors, 
and rearranging the distribution of the cast to 
suit his notions of their several capabilities. The 
fact that the drama had for its principal incident 
the Great Elector's dismissal of his father's 
Minister, Schwarzenberg, doubtless accounted for 
much of the Emperor's personal solicitude as to 
its proper presentation. But it is not in William's 
nature to refrain from meddling and dictating 
about anything, no matter how trivial, in which 
his interest is aroused. 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 237 

The young Kaiser was never what is called a 
bookish man, and, as has been said before, the 
tremendous pressure of his daily work now leaves 
him no time whatever for reading. But he still 
manages to secure a certain amount of leisure for 
association with intimate friends, and among these 
are a number of highly-cultured men. He gets 
from them what others are obliged to seek in 
books. His inclinations seem to develop steadily 
in the direction of respect for intellectual people 
and products. It is a part of the phenomenon 
of belated growth which we have traced from 
his thirtieth birthday; mentally and spiritually 
cramped up to that time by the despotic influence 
of the small Bismarckian clique, he had still the 
strength and ability to expand his mind and 
character with splendid swiftness when finally the 
bonds were thrown off. One of the pleasantest 
features of the Labour Conference gathering in 
Berlin was the kindly and appreciative way in 
which William gave his chief attention to the 
venerable Jules Simon, talked with him intelli- 
gently about his works, and presented him with 
what of all possible gifts he would most prize — 
some of the manuscript French writings of 
Frederic the Great. It is more than likely that 
a twelvemonth before William did not know any- 
thing at all about either Jules Simon or his books. 

His special liking for the scholarly King of 



238 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

Sweden, and his annual choice of the sombre 
solitudes of the Norwegian coast for his summer 
season of entire rest, are very interesting evidences 
of this progressive mental elevation. William has 
a natural tendency to deference and a display of 
youthful humility toward able men much older 
than himself, as all who have seen him in the 
company of his grandfather, Moltke, Windhorst, 
or Bismarck must have noted, but his attraction 
toward the learned and gentle Scandinavian 
monarch is hardly to be put down to that score. 
Most other princes of William's age, or even 
much older, devote as little time to King Oscar 
as politeness will permit, and for choice prefer 
to spend their holidays at Homburg or Monte 
Carlo. 

No gambling Casino or mere frivolous watering- 
place so much as knows William by sight. He 
detests the whole spirit of these princely resorts. 
He drinks with tolerable freedom at dinner, and 
is neither a prig nor a prude. But he is distinctly 
a moral man. People who are close to him aver 
that he is sincerely religious, and that by no 
means in a latitudinarian sense. So far as his 
actions have thrown light on this subject they 
have indicated a spirit of theological tolerance. 
In the fourth month of his reign, when the Senior 
Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church 
sought to overturn the election of the heterodox 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 239 

Professor Harnack to the chair of Church History 
and Dogma at Berlin, William emphatically 
tossed aside their protest and confirmed the 
selection of the University. At about the same 
time he delivered a public rebuke to certain 
enthusiasts who sought to commit him to an 
approval of Jew-baiting, and since then, as we 
have seen, Dr. Stocker has gone for good. Last 
winter the Emperor gave a most interesting and 
characteristic proof of this broad-minded spirit. 
Two earnestly religious young Germans named 
Haase and May, belonging to a sect called the 
New Church, the basis of which is non-resistance, 
refused on moral grounds to do military service. 
Their persistence naturally brought them into 
collision with the courts, and they were sentenced 
to six weeks' imprisonment. William heard of 
the case, and, while it would not do to remit the 
punishment, he issued directions that their stay 
in prison should be made as comfortable as pos- 
sible. Upon their release he personally gave the 
money to pay their passage to America, whither 
they sailed with the intention of becoming mis- 
sionaries. 

When William ascended the German throne, 
under such unpleasant and prejudicial conditions, 
the world thought of him as an ill-conditioned 
and wildly-reckless young swashbuckler, whose 



240 THE YOUNG EMPEROR. 

head would speedily be turned by the intoxicating 
sense of power, and who would make haste to 
plunge Europe into war. 

Three years of authority have worked such a 
change in him — or, perhaps better, have brought 
to the top so many strong and admirable qualities 
in him which had been dwarfed and obscured by 
adverse circumstances — that the world has in- 
sensibly come to alter its opinion of his character. 
We think of him no longer as a firebrand. He 
preserves enough of the eccentricities of a nervous 
and impetuous individuality, it is true, to still 
impart to public scrutiny of his words and deeds 
an element of apprehension. One still instinctively 
reads the reports of his speeches with an eye cast 
ahead for wild or thoughtless utterances — and 
only too often, as in the case of the "salamander" 
remarks to the Borussian Students' Corps at Bonn 
the other day, finds what was anticipated. But 
even in this matter of an over-hasty and un- 
restrained tongue three years have wrought an 
important improvement, and in almost all other 
respects he is unquestionably a better man and 
a better ruler than the world took it for granted 
he would be. Doubtless as time goes on we shall 
come to regard him in a still more altered light. 

At present what can be fairly said is that he 
stands out with clearness from among European 
sovereigns as a living and genuine personality — 



PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 241 

a young man of imagination, of great activity and 
executive ability, taking gravely serious views of 
his duties and responsibilities, keenly anxious to 
do what he believes to be right, and increasingly 
disposed to look to wise and elevated sources 
of judgment for suggestions as to what is right. 



THE END. 





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